Platform Engineering Team Lead

Electrum Payments • Other • Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa • $400 - $500 / year • 2d ago

Electrum is the next-generation payments technology company that provides cloud-native software to optimize the processing of financial transactions. Since 2012, we have established ourselves as a respected payments technology partner through our deep expertise and track record in delivering trusted enterprise-grade payments solutions. We’ve built a reputation in providing solutions for high-volume, low-value payment schemes and services that enable our clients to deliver to their customers at scale. We love that the projects we work on touch the lives of millions of South Africans daily, making a real difference. We hire the best of the best and we offer great opportunities for personal growth and career progression.

Job Summary

Leading a team of platform engineers.
Ensuring high-quality deliverables.
Driving the success of internal-facing projects.
Fostering a collaborative and productive team culture.
Accelerate engineering teams, helping them build better software, faster.

Responsibilities

Technical Expertise
1. Software development – Leads by example by contributing towards the development of the Electrum Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
2. Solution architecture – Designs and reviews system architectures that have cross-engineering impact.
3. Deployment management - Builds the platform to run cloud native applications, backed by AWS, in EKS Kubernetes Clusters.
4. Software Delivery Project management - Drives the definition, prioritisation and execution of platform initiatives.
5. Requirements gathering - Works with development teams to capture requirements.
Team Leadership
1. Team management - Sets clear goals and objectives for team members and monitors their progress.
2. Growing team members - Cultivates and supports the professional and personal growth of every team member, empowering them to advance in their careers.
3. Team commitment and purpose - Creates a shared sense of purpose among the team, cultivating a deep commitment to their work.
4. Organisational savvy - Understands the vision and strategy of Electrum and plays an influential role in ensuring Electrum's goals are achieved.
5. Recruiting - Recognising talent gaps in their teams and actively recruiting to fill them.
Performance Management
1. One-on-ones - Conduct regular one-on-ones with team members and manage their performance and career development.
2. Performance Reviews - Conduct performance evaluations of team members.
Tooling / Stack
1. Kubernetes & Containerisation: Using Kubernetes, Istio, ArgoCD, Helm & CI/CD to build & deploy & manage containerised workloads.
2. Monitoring and Logging: Using tooling such as Prometheus, Loki, Grafana & ELK to monitor Kubernetes resources and Java workloads.
3. Source Control & CI/CD: Making use of GitHub & Github Actions for version control & CI/CD.
4. Operating Systems: Making use of Ansible and shell scripting to configure & manage unix environments (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
5. Building, Collaboration & Communicating the IDP: Strong communication skills within a team environment with an ability to effectively document processes and mentor engineers on best practices and platform use.
6. A Grasp of Backend Development: Hands-on experience in designing, developing, and deploying scalable backend services using Java, and experience in writing scripts to solve ad-hoc problems.
7. Cloud Infrastructure: An intermediate understanding of AWS/Cloud services and best practices, e.g. the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
8. Infrastructure as Code (AWS & Terraform): Experience using the AWS CDK & Terraform to write and manage infrastructure.
9. Architecture and Design Patterns: Familiarity with common design patterns and architectural principles, including Domain-Driven Design (DDD), Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), and distributed computing architecture.
10. Computer Networking: Knowledge/experience of core networking concepts, i.e. configuring computer networking policies, ip allocations, routing, dns, preferably with experience with AWS networking, i.e. VPCs, Subnets, NAT Gateways, Internet Gateways, Peering, VPC PrivateLink, Global Accelerators, Load Balancing etc.
11. Database Management: Expertise in designing, optimising, and maintaining relational databases (e.g., MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL), including experience with event pipelining, i.e. using Apache Kafka.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering.
2 – 3 years experience leading a software development team.
2+ years experience working as a developer in a software development team.
2+ years experience deploying, managing and rightsizing Kubernetes clusters, resources and underlying infrastructure.
2+ years experience in designing & operating public cloud environments.
Experience in building / running Java or C# applications.

Beneficial Experience

Any certifications you recommend for a platform engineer?
Experience in Agile / Scrum methodologies.
Experience using GitOps / CI-CD workflows for infrastructure as code and Helm workload deployments.
An understanding of AWS/Cloud services and best practices, e.g. the AWS Well-Architected Framework.