DevOps and Platform Engineer at Recru-IT, Durban

Recru-IT is looking for a DevOps and Platform Engineer to take daily ownership of the hosting platform that runs the company applications. You will work in private hosted environments as well as public cloud services on AWS and Azure, making sure everything stays patched, secure, monitored, recoverable and well documented. This is a hands on role where you implement and maintain the virtual machines, services and automation that get applications onto the platform reliably.

You will report to the Platform and Engineering Manager, who sets the hosting standards. Your job is to implement and maintain the environment to those standards and be the main day to day owner of the platform.

Key areas of the role:

• Hosting infrastructure: implement, configure, operate and maintain virtual machines and services, carry out routine maintenance, patching, upgrades and certificate renewals, and provision or decommission environments in a repeatable way.
• Automation and delivery pipelines: build and maintain CI and CD pipelines, define infrastructure as code so environments can be rebuilt from source control, and support developers with correct deployments.
• Security and hardening: apply hardening baselines, network segmentation and firewall rules, manage access on a least privilege basis, handle secrets and certificates, and run scanning in pipelines.
• Backup, recovery and resilience: implement and operate backups, test restores on a schedule, and maintain recovery runbooks.
• Monitoring and incident response: implement monitoring, alerting and log collection, respond to hosting incidents, and take part in out of hours support.
• Change control and cost awareness: raise changes through the IT Operations change process, record what changed and why, right size and tag resources, and flag unused resources.
• Documentation and knowledge sharing: maintain runbooks, architecture diagrams and procedures so another team member can operate, restore and rebuild the environment in your absence.

• 5 or more years in infrastructure, DevOps or hosting roles running production systems
• Hands on experience implementing and running virtual machines and services in privately hosted environments including virtualisation platforms
• Working experience with AWS and Azure services enough to implement and maintain them where needed
• Strong Linux server administration
• Containerisation experience with Docker and an orchestrator such as Docker Swarm or Kubernetes, including reverse proxies and load balancing
• Infrastructure as code experience with tools such as Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation or Ansible
• CI and CD pipeline experience
• Solid networking knowledge including DNS, TLS, firewalls, VPNs and network segmentation
• Practical experience with backup, restore and disaster recovery including having tested restores
• Experience with monitoring, logging and alerting tools
• Understanding of identity and access management including least privilege, role based access, SSO and OAuth
• Scripting ability in Bash, PowerShell or Python
• Clear written documentation and the discipline to work to a standard set by someone else and show evidence of compliance
• Willingness to take part in out of hours support
• Advantageous: AWS or Azure associate level certifications, understanding of NIST and CIS controls and CIS benchmark hardening, familiarity with POPIA

• Implement, configure, operate and maintain hosting virtual machines and services in private hosted environments according to standards set by the Platform and Engineering Manager
• Implement and maintain public cloud services on AWS and Azure where the business needs them
• Carry out routine maintenance including patching, upgrades, certificate and credential renewals and lifecycle management
• Provision and decommission development, test and production environments in a consistent and repeatable way
• Maintain an accurate inventory of hosted systems, environments and their dependencies
• Build and maintain CI and CD pipelines used by the development team
• Define infrastructure as code so environments can be rebuilt from source control rather than by hand
• Automate repetitive operational work and reduce manual steps in deployment and maintenance
• Support developers in deploying and running their applications correctly in each environment
• Apply hardening baselines, network segmentation and firewall and access rules across hosted environments
• Manage access to hosting environments on a least privilege basis, review it regularly and remove it promptly when no longer needed
• Manage secrets, keys and certificates so that no credentials sit in code or repositories
• Run dependency, container image and configuration scanning in the pipelines and act on the results with the Platform and Engineering Manager
• Remediate hosting related security and risk findings within agreed timelines and provide evidence of the fix for independent verification
• Implement and operate backups aligned to agreed RPO and RTO and system classification
• Test restores on a regular schedule and record the results
• Maintain recovery runbooks and contribute to disaster recovery and business continuity planning
• Implement monitoring, alerting and log collection for hosted systems and keep alerts actionable
• Respond to hosting incidents, restore service and document the root cause and follow up actions
• Take part in out of hours support for hosted systems
• Raise hosting changes through the IT Operations change process and implement only approved changes, recording what was changed, when and why
• Right size and tag resources, flag unused or underused resources and provide consumption data to the Platform and Engineering Manager
• Maintain runbooks, architecture diagrams and procedures so another team member can operate, restore and rebuild the environment in your absence
• Work with the Platform and Engineering Manager and senior developers so that at least one other person can perform critical tasks such as restoring from backup, rotating credentials and deploying to production