Infrastructure SRE Team Lead

A vacancy exists for an Infrastructure SRE Team Lead within the Micro Merchant Division – Kazang, in Cape Town, Century City.

This role is ideal for a seasoned Infrastructure SRE professional looking to take on a leadership position and drive innovation within a dynamic team.

We are seeking an experienced Infrastructure Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Team Lead with deep expertise in Linux-based, open-source environments to lead a team ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our critical systems. This role involves technical leadership, strategic planning, and hands-on implementation of automated solutions for system monitoring, optimization, and infrastructure management. You will collaborate with the DevOps and engineering teams, guiding best practices in CI/CD, observability, and infrastructure automation, while mentoring a team to enhance system resilience and operational efficiency.

Key Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Lead and mentor a team, fostering a culture of reliability, automation, and continuous improvement.
• Provide technical guidance and career development support for team members.
• Design, implement, and maintain reliable systems in a Linux and open-source environment to meet uptime and performance objectives.
• Support the DevOps team with CI/CD pipelines, ensuring seamless and reliable deployments.
• Manage and optimize AWS-based infrastructure for scalability, cost efficiency, and performance.
• Develop and maintain monitoring and alerting systems to ensure observability and proactively address system issues.
• Build and maintain robust solutions for metric collection, dashboarding, and alerting to provide actionable insights and real-time system visibility.
• Conduct root cause analysis for incidents, implementing preventive measures to improve system resilience.
• Perform regular system maintenance, including updates, patches, and optimizations.
• Prepare and deliver comprehensive reporting on system performance, incidents, and reliability metrics.
• Identify and mitigate risks to system reliability, scalability, and security.
• Ensure compliance with organizational and regulatory standards in system design and operations.
• Manage on-call rotations and incident response protocols.

Minimum Requirements:

• Bachelor of Science or any related tertiary qualification.
• A minimum of 5 years of professional experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or a related field, with demonstrated expertise in Linux-based, open-source environments, and cloud infrastructure (AWS), wanting to progress into a leadership capacity.
• Proven ability to mentor and develop team members.

Competencies required:

• Excellent leadership and communication skills.
• Strategic thinker with a proactive and results-oriented approach.
• Ability to build and maintain strong cross-functional relationships.
• High attention to detail and ability to enforce best practices.
• Passion for technology and continuous learning.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Expertise in diagnosing and resolving complex system issues, including performance bottlenecks, service outages, and application errors, using debugging tools, logs, and monitoring data.
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (e.g., Python, Bash, Go), with the ability to write automation scripts, develop tools, and optimize system performance.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services (e.g., EC2, S3, RDS, VPC), with the ability to design, manage, and optimize cloud-based infrastructure for scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
• Skilled in implementing monitoring solutions and designing systems for metrics collection, dashboarding, and alerting to ensure system health and performance.
• Proficiency with tools like Ansible, Terraform, or similar frameworks to automate system management, deployments, and configurations, reducing manual effort and ensuring consistency.
• Demonstrates a proactive and analytical approach to identifying issues, diagnosing root causes, and implementing effective solutions in complex technical environments.
• Works effectively with cross-functional teams, including DevOps, development, and operations, fostering a culture of shared ownership and open communication to achieve reliability goals.
• Embraces change, learns new technologies quickly, and adjusts strategies to meet evolving system and organizational needs, particularly in fast-paced, dynamic environments.