Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Position Overview

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Sanlam Fintech is responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our cloud-native infrastructure and services. This role bridges software engineering and operations, applying engineering principles to solve complex infrastructure challenges. The SRE will focus on building and maintaining resilient systems on AWS, implementing comprehensive observability solutions, and driving automation across the infrastructure lifecycle.

Operating in a DevOps environment, the SRE takes full ownership of the systems they build and operate, ensuring high availability and optimal customer experience. They work closely with Software Engineers, Platform Engineers, and DevSecOps teams to deliver infrastructure solutions that support Sanlam Fintech business objectives and uphold our commitment to operational excellence.

What will you do?

Reliability & Resilience

• Build highly available, fault-tolerant systems on AWS
• Define SLIs, SLOs and error budgets to track and improve reliability
• Plan and implement disaster recovery strategies (RTO/RPO)
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis
• Build self-healing systems with automated fixes for common failures
• Run chaos engineering tests to find and fix weaknesses

Observability & Monitoring

• Set up metrics, logs and traces for full system visibility
• Build dashboards and alerts for fast incident detection
• Implement distributed tracing to spot performance issues
• Set monitoring standards and maintain operational runbooks
• Publish regular uptime and operational metrics reports

Infrastructure Automation

• Write and maintain Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and CloudFormation
• Automate provisioning, configuration and deployments with DevOps/Platform teams
• Build and manage CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions
• Implement GitOps practices and self-service automation to reduce manual work

Cloud Infrastructure & Architecture

• Design and optimise serverless solutions (Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions)
• Manage and optimise Kubernetes clusters
• Implement cloud-native patterns like event-driven and microservices architectures
• Optimise cloud costs and evaluate new AWS services

Software Engineering & Development

• Build clean, well-structured automation tools and scripts
• Apply Clean Architecture and Domain-Driven Design to infrastructure code
• Improve internal tools to boost developer productivity
• Use AI tools (Claude, GPT) to automate routine tasks

Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing

• Work with cross-functional teams using Jira, Confluence and JSM
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident handoffs
• Mentor junior engineers in SRE practices
• Document decisions, procedures and run blameless postmortems

Qualification and Experience

Required Experience

• 5+ years of experience in systems engineering, DevOps, or site reliability engineering roles 
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with AWS cloud services in production environments
• 2+ years of experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and/or CloudFormation) 
• Demonstrated experience in incident management and on-call responsibilities
• Track record of implementing automation that reduced operational toil

Educational Background

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or related field; or equivalent practical experience
• Relevant professional certifications are advantageous but not required

What will make you successful in this role?

Observability & Monitoring

• Expertise in Datadog, Cloudwatch and OTEL for full-stack observability including APM, infrastructure monitoring, log management and synthetic testing and monitoring
• Experience designing and implementing SLI/SLO frameworks
• Proficiency in creating effective dashboards, alerts and runbooks
• Understanding of distributed tracing and correlation across services

Development & Version Control

• Strong experience with GitHub for version control, code review and CI/CD workflows
• Understanding of Clean Architecture principles and their application to infrastructure code 
• Familiarity with Domain-Driven Design concepts for complex system design
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions

Tools & Platforms

• Proficiency with Atlassian suite (Jira, Confluence) for project management and documentation
• Experience leveraging AI tools (Claude, GPT) for code generation, documentation, and problem-solving
• Familiarity with containerisation technologies (Docker) and orchestration platforms 
• Experience with Linux system administration and troubleshooting

Nice To Have Skills

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