Senior Platform Engineer

Position Overview

The Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the internal developer platform that enables software engineering teams across Sanlam Fintech to deliver value efficiently and reliably. This role focuses on creating self-service infrastructure abstractions, standardised tooling, and automated workflows that reduce cognitive load on development teams while enforcing organisational best practices for security, compliance, and operational excellence.

You will work at the intersection of software development and infrastructure operations, applying software engineering principles to infrastructure challenges. Your primary customers are fellow engineers, and your success will be measured by developer productivity, platform adoption, and reduction in operational toil across multiple diverse teams.

What will you do?

Internal Developer Platform & Portal

• Design and implement self-service developer portals and golden paths that enable development teams to provision infrastructure, deploy applications, and manage services independently
• Build and maintain internal developer portal capabilities that provide service catalogues, documentation, and operational dashboards
• Create intuitive abstractions that hide infrastructure complexity while maintaining flexibility for diverse team requirements

Infrastructure as Code & Cloud Architecture

• Develop and maintain reusable Terraform modules and CloudFormation templates that encode organisational standards for AWS resources
• Design and implement serverless architectures using AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, and related services optimised for cost and performance
• Apply clean architecture principles and domain-driven design to platform component boundaries and infrastructure organisation

CI/CD & Automation

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions that enforce security scanning, quality gates, and deployment best practices
• Implement GitOps workflows and automated deployment strategies including blue-green and canary deployments
• Leverage AI tools (Claude, GPT) to accelerate development, improve automation quality, and enhance documentation

Container Orchestration & Kubernetes

• Deploy, operate, and optimise Kubernetes clusters (EKS) and containerised workloads
• Develop Helm charts, Kubernetes operators, and standardised deployment manifests for platform consumers

Observability & Reliability

• Implement comprehensive observability using Datadog including custom dashboards, alerts, and SLO tracking
• Define and monitor platform SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets to ensure reliability standards are met

Cross-Team Collaboration & Enablement

• Work across multiple diverse teams to identify optimisation opportunities and drive adoption of platform capabilities
• Collaborate with development teams to understand their needs and build appropriate abstractions that improve their workflows
• Maintain comprehensive documentation in Confluence and manage work effectively using Jira and the Atlassian suite

Qualification and Experience

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering

• Demonstrated experience building and operating production infrastructure at scale

• Track record of improving developer productivity and implementing self-service capabilities

• Experience working across multiple teams to drive adoption of platform capabilities

• Relevant tertiary qualification in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience)

What will make you successful in this role?

Cloud & Infrastructure

• AWS: Strong proficiency with core services including Lambda, API Gateway, ECS/EKS, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, IAM, and VPC. Experience designing serverless architectures
• Infrastructure as Code: Expert-level Terraform skills with experience writing reusable modules. Proficiency with AWS CloudFormation
• Kubernetes: Experience deploying and operating Kubernetes clusters, writing Helm charts, and managing containerised workloads

Development & Automation

• Programming: Strong proficiency in at least one of: Python, Java, Node.js, or Rust. Ability to write production-quality code for platform tooling and automation
• CI/CD: Experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions. Understanding of GitOps principles
• Version Control: Advanced GitHub skills including branching strategies, pull request workflows, and repository management

Architecture & Design

• Cloud Architecture: Understanding of serverless patterns, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native design principles
• Software Architecture: Knowledge of clean architecture principles and domain-driven design (DDD) patterns

Observability & Tooling

• Monitoring: Experience with Datadog (or similar) for metrics, logging, APM, and alerting. Understanding of SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
• Collaboration Tools: Proficiency with Atlassian suite (Jira, Confluence) for documentation and project management
• AI Tools: Experience using AI assistants (Claude, GPT) effectively for development acceleration and automation

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience designing and implementing internal developer portals (Backstage, Port, or custom solutions)

• Service mesh experience (Istio, Linkerd) and advanced Kubernetes patterns

• FinOps experience and cloud cost optimisation strategies

• Security automation and DevSecOps practices including SAST, DAST, and container scanning

• Experience with multiple programming languages from the required list

• Financial services or fintech industry experience

• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer).

• Experience with event-driven architectures using Kafka, EventBridge, or SNS/SQS.

Knowledge and Skills

Personal Attributes

Build a successful career with us

We’re all about building strong, lasting relationships with our employees. We know that you have hopes for your future – your career, your personal development and of achieving great things. We pride ourselves in helping  our employees to realise their worth. Through its five business clusters – Sanlam Fintech, Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz, Santam, as well as MiWay and the Group Office – the group provides many opportunities for growth and development.

Core Competencies

Turnaround time

The shortlisting process will only start once the application due date has been reached. The time taken to complete this process will depend on how far you progress and the availability of managers. 

Our commitment to transformation