Devops Engineer

Position summary

We're looking for a DevOps Engineer to own that infrastructure — the AWS environment, the CI/CD pipelines and the security posture — and to carry the operational load so product engineers can keep shipping.

This is a hands-on role with real ownership. You will be the person who decides how the company builds, deploys, monitors and secures everything it runs.

Location: Nairobi, Kenya

Type: Full-Time, Onsite

Key responsibilities

1. Cloud infrastructure and scalability

• Own and operate the company's AWS environment, covering EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, ElastiCache, load balancers, Route 53 and CloudFront.
  
• Move the platform from single production and development instances to a clustered, load-balanced and auto-scaling architecture that holds up as livestream and campaign traffic grows.
  
• Define infrastructure as code using Terraform or CloudFormation, with parity across development, staging and production.
  
• Plan capacity and performance ahead of peak moments such as livestream sales, campaign launches and end-of-year shopping periods.
  
• Prepare the infrastructure for multi-market operation as the company expands beyond Kenya.
  

2. CI/CD, release engineering and developer enablement

• Own the CI/CD pipelines for Laravel (PHP), Node.js and Flutter across web and mobile.
  
• Automate build, test, release and rollback so deployments become routine rather than an event.
  
• Containerise services with Docker and move provisioning away from manual server setup.
  
• Set up and maintain mobile release pipelines to the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.
  
• Unblock the Full-Stack and Mobile developers on environments, build failures, test data and release cuts.
  

3. Security, access control and compliance

• Harden the infrastructure behind the company's payments product, where creator funds, advances and repayments sit.
  
• Implement least-privilege access, privileged access management on the internal admin console, secrets management and key rotation.
  
• Enforce encryption in transit and at rest, network segmentation, and web application firewall and DDoS protection at the edge.
  
• Run vulnerability scanning and patch management across servers, containers and dependencies.
  
• Support internal security assessments and external penetration testing, then track and validate every fix.
  
• Meet the security and data-handling expectations of banking and payment partners, and align with the Kenya Data Protection Act and card industry standards where they apply.
  

4. Reliability, observability and incident response

• Build monitoring, logging and alerting that shows the real state of the platform, using Sentry, CloudWatch and an equivalent metrics and log aggregation stack.
  
• Set service level objectives, run the on-call rotation, and lead incident response and post-incident reviews.
  
• Own backups and disaster recovery for transactional data such as orders, payouts, wallet events and loan records, with restores tested rather than assumed.
  
• Tune MySQL and Redis for performance, and keep database growth under control as volumes rise.
  

5. Cost, governance and teamwork

• Track and reduce cloud spend, and make cost per transaction and cost per active creator visible to the business.
  
• Document architecture, runbooks and standards so knowledge does not sit with one person.
  
• Review infrastructure-related code and coach the team on secure defaults.
  
• Work on partner integrations, technical due diligence and audit readiness.
  

Qualifications and technical skills

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, Information Security or a related field.
  
• 5+ years of professional experience in DevOps, site reliability, platform or cloud infrastructure engineering, running production systems.
  
• Strong AWS experience across both infrastructure and security: EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, security groups, WAF and backup tooling.
  
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform or CloudFormation.
  
• Docker in production, with container orchestration experience (ECS, EKS or Kubernetes).
  
• Ownership of CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines or similar.
  
• Linux administration, plus hands-on experience with Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL and Redis.
  
• Scripting and automation in Bash and at least one of Python or Go.
  
• Monitoring, logging and alerting in production, with real incident response experience.
  
• Solid grounding in application and network security: TLS, key management, identity and access management, and vulnerability management.
  
• Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows.
  

Additional skills preferred

• Experience in fintech or financial services, ideally a bank, payment service provider or lender, working on or close to financial rails such as mobile money, card processing, core banking, wallets or ledgers.
  
• Familiarity with PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2 or the Kenya Data Protection Act, and with supporting audits or partner security reviews.
  
• Certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect, AWS Security Specialty, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, CISSP or OSCP.
  
• Experience supporting Laravel and Flutter teams.
  
• Exposure to streaming or real-time media infrastructure.
  
• Experience with multi-tenant infrastructure serving several partners from a single platform.
  

KPIs / What success looks like

• Platform availability against agreed service level objectives, with the payments product and live-shopping feature held to the highest standard.
  
• Higher deployment frequency and shorter lead time for changes, with a low change failure rate.
  
• Faster mean time to recovery, and P1 incidents that do not recur.
  
• Security findings closed within agreed windows, with no critical issues left open after assessments.
  
• Backups and disaster recovery tested and proven, not assumed.
  
• Cloud cost per transaction and per active creator trending down as volumes grow.
  
• Product engineers unblocked, with environments, pipelines and releases no longer a bottleneck.