Senior Kubernetes Architect

The Senior Kubernetes Architect leads the architecture, design, and governance of Syspro's enterprise Kubernetes platform, delivering scalable multitenancy solutions that underpin the organisation's cloud operations strategy. The role combines deep technical expertise with cross-functional leadership, ensuring the platform meets reliability, security, and performance requirements while integrating AI-powered tooling to advance operational maturity.

Responsibilities

• Architect and govern Syspro’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform, ensuring scalability, security, and multitenancy isolation across all workloads and tenants.
• Define platform standards, design patterns, and technical blueprints for container orchestration, networking, storage, and security across the cloud environment.
• Lead the design and implementation of multitenancy strategies — including namespace isolation, RBAC policies, network policies, and resource quotas — aligned to enterprise governance requirements.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to the Junior Kubernetes Architect and SRE Platform Engineer, conducting architecture reviews and guiding implementation decisions.
• Evaluate and integrate AI-powered platform management tools — including AIOps, intelligent auto-scaling, and ML-based anomaly detection — to enhance operational efficiency, reduce toil, and enable predictive reliability.
• Collaborate with the Manager: Cloud Operations and cross-functional stakeholders to align platform architecture with Syspro’s IT strategy, security posture, and capacity roadmap.
• Establish and maintain disaster recovery, high availability, and business continuity architecture for the Kubernetes platform, including runbooks, recovery procedures, and regular testing.
• Assess and drive adoption of emerging Kubernetes ecosystem tools and practices — including service mesh, GitOps, and policy enforcement frameworks — to advance platform maturity and operational resilience.

Requirements

Minimum Level of Education

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent NQF Level 7 qualification.

Beneficial Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in a related discipline. Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS). AWS, GCP, or Azure Solutions Architect certification. CNCF ecosystem certifications advantageous.

Minimum Experience

• 7–10 years in cloud infrastructure or platform engineering, with a minimum of 4 years dedicated to Kubernetes architecture and operations. Demonstrated experience designing and delivering multitenancy Kubernetes platforms at enterprise scale. Proven ability to lead technical teams and drive architecture decisions.

Beneficial Experience

• Experience architecting cloud platforms for SaaS or ERP environments. Exposure to AI and ML workload orchestration on Kubernetes. GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux). Service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd). Prior experience in a technical lead or principal engineer capacity.

Special Skills and Knowledge

• Kubernetes architecture: expert-level design of enterprise Kubernetes clusters, multitenancy models, and cloud-native patterns.
• Multitenancy and RBAC: deep knowledge of namespace isolation, role-based access control, network policies, and resource governance.
• Infrastructure-as-code: proficiency with Terraform, Helm, and Kustomize for repeatable, auditable platform deployments.
• Cloud platforms: hands-on expertise across AWS, GCP, or Azure managed Kubernetes services (EKS, GKE, AKS).
• AI and AIOps integration: experience evaluating and deploying AI-powered platform management, intelligent auto-scaling, and ML-based observability tools.
• Technical leadership: ability to mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and drive architectural consensus across teams.
• Security and compliance: expertise in container security, secrets management, image scanning, and compliance hardening for regulated environments.
• GitOps and DevSecOps: strong understanding of GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux) and secure CI/CD pipeline design.

Communication and influence: capable of articulating complex architectural decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders at leadership level.

Benefits

• 25 annual leave days
• 30 days paid sick leave over 3-year cycle
• Hybrid working environment (3 office days as determined by the function/ manager)
• Pension 10%
• Medical aid
• Life insurance
• Income continuation protection
• Funeral Benefit
• Provident Fund Admin Fee
• Global Education Protection
• Bonus/ commission programmes
• Maternity: 6 months at half pay
• Paternity: 2 weeks full pay
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Free Barista Coffee Daily
• Gym Facilities
• Free Daily Lunch
• Free Fruit on a Tuesday & Thursday
• Free Refreshments & Snacks Daily