Lead DevOps Engineer

About the role

We are seeking a Lead DevOps Engineer to own and evolve a massive, high‑traffic scraping platform that processes billions of requests worldwide. Based in South Africa and working in a remote‑first environment, you will combine hands‑on engineering with strategic leadership to ensure the platform is reliable, secure and cost‑effective at extreme scale.

Key responsibilities

• Define and drive the end‑to‑end platform roadmap, identifying architectural gaps and long‑term priorities.
• Consolidate multiple infrastructure stacks into a unified, scalable platform with minimal disruption.
• Design, build and optimise cloud infrastructure for performance, security and cost efficiency.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, logging and disaster‑recovery strategies to guarantee resilience.
• Lead cost‑optimization initiatives, especially around proxy and compute expenses.
• Strengthen security posture by proactively addressing vulnerabilities.
• Collaborate with engineering teams on system design and support AI‑related development workflows.
• Mentor engineers and raise platform‑engineering maturity, tooling and processes.

Required profile

• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, Platform or Infrastructure Engineering at scale.
• Proven track record leading large‑scale, distributed systems in a fast‑moving environment.
• Strong ownership mindset and ability to influence architecture and cost decisions.

Required skills

• Kubernetes and container orchestration
• Terraform (Infrastructure as Code)
• CI/CD pipeline construction
• Cloud providers such as DigitalOcean, Hetzner
• Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, MongoDB
• Observability tools: Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, ELK stack
• Security best practices and vulnerability management