DevOps Engineer

About us

We're a fast-growing, venture-backed technology company operating in the creator economy and fintech space in East Africa. Our platform combines influencer marketing, social commerce and embedded financial services — wallets, payouts, storefront checkouts and a growing lending book — helping online creators and small businesses build sustainable income.

Position summary

The company moves real money for creators every day, and that money runs on infrastructure that has to stay up, stay fast and stay secure.

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.

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.

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 Speciality, 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.

Who you are: key qualities

• Ownership mindset: you run it, you monitor it, you improve it.
• Automation first: if you do something twice by hand, you script it the third time.
• Security- and data-privacy-conscious: you are protecting creator money, so you design for trust.
• Calm under pressure: you stay steady during incidents and honest in the review afterwards.
• Collaborative communicator: you work closely with Product, Design, Growth and Ops, and you make life easier for the engineers around you.
• Comfortable in fast-moving startups: balancing speed with long-term maintainability.