AWS DevOps Consultant
Summary
Senior AWS DevOps engineer on a 12-month contract (hybrid, Johannesburg) who leads the design, security, and operational excellence of a production AWS platform. Day-to-day: building infrastructure as code with CDK/CloudFormation, owning CI/CD pipelines, applying Zero Trust security, and supporting production with on-call.
Senior AWS DevOps Engineer
Contract | 12 months | Start: January 2027 Hybrid — Johannesburg The Role
Lead the design, automation, security, reliability, and operational excellence of a production AWS platform. You’ll work closely with software engineering teams to enable secure, reliable software delivery while maintaining highly available cloud environments.
Focus: Cloud Infrastructure Engineering (40%) · DevOps & CI/CD (30%) · Automation & Software Engineering (30%)
What You’ll Do
- Design, implement, and optimise AWS cloud infrastructure with strong resilience and disaster recovery.
- Own and improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
- Implement Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK and CloudFormation.
- Apply least-privilege and Zero Trust principles; manage encryption, KMS, Secrets Manager, and remediate security findings.
- Support production environments, participate in on-call, drive root-cause analysis, and improve platform reliability.
- Mentor engineers, review infrastructure and application code, and lead modernisation initiatives.
What You Bring
Preferred: 10+ years in Cloud Engineering, DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering, with strong production AWS experience at scale (enterprise, startup, or scale-up).
Alternative path considered: 6+ years with significant production ownership, deep AWS operational experience, strong automation capability, and rapid technical progression (startup/scale-up experience a plus).
Core AWS skills:
Core AWS skills: ECS, Lambda, VPC, Route53, CloudFront, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Organizations, cross-account architectures, and cloud security governance.
Also required:
Infrastructure as Code and automationSecurity fundamentals (encryption, IAM, least privilege, Zero Trust, Security by Design)Databases: PostgreSQL and DynamoDBComfortable reading, understanding, and modifying application code; developing automation tooling and scripts
Nice to have:
Nice to have: EKS, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, CloudWatch, EventBridge, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, SonarQube, Snyk, Blue/Green deployments, and experience with AI-assisted engineering tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude).
What Makes You Stand Out
Startup or scale-up experienceOwnership of production AWS platformsExperience building cloud platforms from the ground upCloud transformation or modernisation track recordStrong automation background
Relevant tertiary qualification is advantageous but not essential. Equivalent practical experience will be considered.