Senior Engineering Manager

Zappi

. Lead a team of five platform and SRE engineers across core infrastructure and developer experience .

Posted 10/28/2026full-timeCape Town • South AfricaSenior💰 ZAR 1,090,000 - ZAR 1,270,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in managing platform and SRE teams, with a strong focus on Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and AI workloads. Proven ability to enhance developer experience through tooling, self-service provisioning, and effective incident management.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Kubernetes ManagementCloud Infrastructure (AWS)Infrastructure As CodeCI/CDAI Workload Management

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

KubernetesTerraformGitOpsCI/CDAI WorkloadsIncident ResponseObservabilitySelf-Service ProvisioningCost ManagementProduction Availability

Soft Skills

Team LeadershipCoachingEffective CommunicationProblem IdentificationFeedback Delivery

Tools & Technologies

KOpsClaude CodeCodexSelf-Hosted ModelsDeveloper Tooling

Industry Keywords

Platform EngineeringSREInfrastructure EngineeringAI SafetyProduction Upgrades

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudEC2KubernetesTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Lead a team of five platform and SRE engineers across core infrastructure and developer experience
Keep infrastructure and AI workloads reliable, secure, current and cost-effective
Manage self-managed Kubernetes clusters using kOps on EC2
Maintain Terraform-based infrastructure and GitOps deployments
Support GPU workloads and self-hosted models in production
Help teams determine when open-source models are preferable to APIs
Build developer tooling for teams and AI agents
Improve environments, application setup, configuration and self-service provisioning
Define safe agent capabilities, guardrails and audit trails
Coach and grow engineers alongside technical leads
Run technical discussions, make team decisions, write code where it matters and respond to incidents
Work with engineers, engineering managers and leadership to set the roadmap
Own rollouts when changes ship
Run and reduce the team support rotation by creating self-service tools
Collaborate with engineering teams in London and Cape Town

Requirements

What you’ll need

Strong platform skills: Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS), infrastructure as code, CI/CD and observability
Comfortable debating architecture with senior engineers
Excited and curious about AI in engineering
Experience using tools like Claude Code or Codex
Knowledge of how AI can work safely on real systems
High standards for production availability, upgrades, security, cost and capacity
Calm incident response and effective on-call management
Product sense and ability to identify underlying problems
Enjoyment of managing people, growing engineers, giving honest feedback and helping teams through change
Around ten years in software or infrastructure engineering
At least three years managing platform, SRE or infrastructure engineers
Self-managed Kubernetes experience, ideally with kOps, is a big plus
GPU or AI infrastructure experience is a big plus
Degree field is flexible; exact tools used are not prescribed
Based in Cape Town

Benefits

Comp & perks

Unlimited holidays, with a minimum of at least 20 days per year plus national holidays
Three company-paid mental health days of rest every year
Thoughtfully designed offices supporting individual work and collaboration
Private medical healthcare cover
Medical Aid
Group risk, life & disability contributions
Free yoga and access to trained therapists / counsellors
Paid 24h secure parking in Cape Town
Free coffee, lunches and in-office snacks
Tailored personal development through training allowances, coaching, mentorship and career frameworks
10% annual bonus