AWS DevOps Lead

AWS DevOps Lead

Location: Remote/ South Africa

Level: Senior / Lead (technical and team management)

Reporting to: AWS Technical Delivery Manager

Role purpose

Lead Silicon Overdrive's AWS DevOps and platform engineering capability. The role is responsible for building and managing the DevOps team, setting the engineering standards the team works to, and remaining hands-on across customer AWS environments, migrations, modernization projects and managed services.

This is a working lead role rather than a senior engineering role. Approximately half of the role is

hands-on engineering, with the balance focused on people leadership, ownership of DevOps

workstream delivery and customer engagement, including onboarding and developing the engineers who report directly to you within the DevOps team.

The role combines hands-on engineering, solution architecture, people leadership and

customer engagement. The successful candidate should be able to design solutions and lead the

team required to build and operate them.

Core responsibilities

Team leadership and people management

• Grow and develop the DevOps team, including defining the roles required, conducting interviews and approving new hires.
• Manage direct reports, including one-on-ones, leave approval, performance reviews and performance improvement plans where required.
• Onboard new engineers and establish an individual development plan and AWS certification pathway for each team member.
• Allocate work across the team and provide capacity and skills requirements as input to monthly delivery planning.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews and pairing, and develop a second in- charge (2IC) to provide leadership cover.
• Drive the engagement, development and retention of high-performing engineers to maintain team stability.

Technical delivery

• Own technical delivery of DevOps workstreams on time, within quoted effort and within agreed scope.
• Produce accurate technical estimates and ensure scope changes are documented and formally approved before work commences.
• Provide technical sign-off and input to project close-out reports.
• Build and maintain reusable delivery assets, including Terraform modules, pipeline templates, runbooks and SOPs, to optimize delivery time across projects.
• Track and improve delivery performance metrics, including deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and mean time to recovery.

Engineering and platform

• Lead the design and implementation of secure, scalable AWS architectures.
• Define DevOps, Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD standards across projects.
• Design and implement AWS landing zones and multi-account environments using AWS Organizations and Control Tower.
• Lead Terraform architecture, reusable modules and automation standards.
• Design and operate container platforms, particularly Amazon EKS and ECS.
• Build and manage containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes, including Helm - based deployments.
• Design CI/CD and GitOps pipelines using tools such as GitHub Actions and GitLab.
• Implement monitoring, observability, logging and alerting.
• Design backup and disaster recovery solutions, define RTO and RPO requirements with customers, and conduct DR testing.
• Support AWS migrations and application modernization.

Security, governance and compliance

• Ensure infrastructure aligns to AWS Well-Architected principles and lead the remediation of Well-Architected findings, prioritizing critical and high-risk items.
• Implement security controls around IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, GuardDuty, Security Hub and related AWS services.
• Embed security into CI/CD pipelines through policy-as-code, IaC scanning and secrets scanning.
• Maintain a strong security posture across delivered environments, aligned to applicable regulatory and compliance standards, including POPIA, GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, NIST and HIPAA.

Operations and SLA support

• Act as the escalation point for complex AWS issues and lead incident response for P1 and P2 incidents.
• Conduct root cause analysis and post-incident reviews and ensure corrective actions are implemented.
• Establish and manage the team's on-call and support rotation to ensure SLA response and resolution commitments are met.
• Provide proactive advice to managed services customers on optimization, reliability and cost reduction.

Customer and commercial

• Participate in customer architecture and technical discovery workshops.
• Produce architectures, estimates and technical proposals, and provide technical input to Statements of Work.
• Communicate technical status, risks and decisions clearly to customer stakeholders.
• Ensure engineering effort is efficient and billable, with a sound understanding of utilization and delivery margin.
• Work closely with Presales, Delivery, Managed Services, Security and FinOps teams.

Mandatory experience

• 7+ years overall infrastructure/cloud/DevOps experience, with at least 4+ years substantial AWS experience.
• 2+ years leading or managing engineers, including hiring, performance management and day-to-day work allocation.
• Strong production experience with:
• AWS core services: IAM, VPC/networking, EC2, S3, RDS/Aurora, AWS Organizations and AWS security principles.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform and AWS CloudFormation, including module design and state management.
• Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (pods, deployments, services, Helm) and Amazon EKS.
• CI/CD pipelines and Git-based workflows.
• CloudWatch and CloudTrail for monitoring, logging and audit.
• Linux, and scripting in Python and/or Bash
• Demonstrated experience in customer-facing technical delivery within a consulting, AWS partner or managed services environment.
• Proven experience managing production incidents and on-call support against contracted SLAs.
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional or AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, or the ability to achieve one within 6 months of joining.

Advantageous

• Experience with Amazon ECS, AWS Control Tower and landing zone accelerators.
• Additional AWS certifications, such as Security – Specialty or Advanced Networking – Specialty.
• Experience with Pulumi.
• HashiCorp Terraform Associate, CKA or CKAD certification.
• Experience implementing policy-as-code and IaC security scanning in pipelines, such as Checkov, tfsec or OPA.
• Experience in backup and DR design, including DR testing.
• Experience in FinOps and AWS cost optimization.
• Exposure to AI/ML workloads, including Amazon Bedrock or SageMaker infrastructure, MLOps pipelines, or using AI-assisted tooling in engineering delivery.
• Delivery experience in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, higher education or public sector.
• ITIL 4 Foundation.
• BSc in Information Technology, Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Leadership and behavioral competencies

• Leads by example, balancing people management with hands-on technical delivery.
• Maintains high standards of quality, documentation and security without compromising delivery timelines.
• Communicates clearly with engineers, customers and management.
• Remains composed and decisive under pressure during incidents.
• Takes full ownership of, and accountability for, outcomes.
• Commercially aware, balancing engineering quality against effort, timelines and cost.

Our appointments will be made with a view to meeting our EE numerical goals and targets.