Hybrid Principal DevOps Engineer

at KingMakers

• Job title: Principal DevOps Engineer
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Azure, Cloud, Grafana, Kubernetes, NGINX, NoSQL, Prometheus, Python, React, SQL, Terraform, Go, .NET
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Cape Town, South Africa

About the role

• Principal DevOps Engineer at KingMakers focusing on coding and infrastructure within product squads. Leading technical improvements in observability, reliability, and performance across platforms.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across platform and product engineering, setting the direction for observability, reliability, security, and platform architecture.
• Contribute hands-on to critical product and platform codebases (primarily .NET and React), focusing on high-leverage improvements rather than feature throughput.
• Define and drive the organisation-wide observability strategy, including standards and best practices for OpenTelemetry (OTEL), telemetry pipelines, and signal quality.
• Partner with senior engineers and engineering leadership to design scalable, resilient infrastructure using Terraform, AKS, and Azure.
• Establish and champion security-by-default practices across code, infrastructure, and CI/CD — influencing architecture, not just implementation.
• Lead the definition of SLIs, SLOs, and alerting strategies, ensuring reliability is measurable, actionable, and aligned with business outcomes.
• Set standards for monitoring and dashboards in Grafana, ensuring clarity, signal quality, and consistency across teams.
• Design and build shared tooling, platforms, and libraries that materially improve developer productivity and reduce cognitive load.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor and bridge between product engineering, platform engineering, and leadership — shaping decisions through influence rather than authority.
• Mentor senior engineers and help raise the overall engineering bar through design reviews, architectural guidance, and pragmatic coaching.

Requirements

• Deep, production-grade programming experience in at least one major language — C#/.NET strongly preferred; Go, Python, or similar also valued.
• A track record of designing, reviewing, and evolving complex production systems at scale.
• Extensive experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and Kubernetes-based platforms (AKS).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD systems and deployment strategies, ideally using Azure DevOps.
• Excellent grasp of networking fundamentals (TCP, HTTP, headers, tracing, and real-world debugging).
• Proven experience designing secure systems, including identity, access management, secrets handling, and secure pipelines.
• Experience operating in medium-to-large engineering organisations where reliability, scale, and developer experience matter.
• The ability to operate autonomously, identify high-impact problems, and drive solutions end-to-end.
• Clear communication skills — able to explain complex technical trade-offs to engineers and non-engineers alike.
• **Nice to have**
• Deep hands-on experience with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience designing or operating large-scale telemetry, monitoring, or logging systems.
• Strong database knowledge (SQL Server, NoSQL, performance and reliability considerations).
• Experience with Nginx, ingress controllers, or load balancing technologies.
• A security-first mindset balanced with pragmatism, performance, and developer velocity.
• Experience working across distributed or remote teams and influencing without direct authority.

Benefits

• Health Support: A monthly allowance to invest in your health and wellbeing
• Comprehensive Insurance: Extra protection and peace of mind for you and your loved ones
• Future Planning: Employer contributions towards your long-term financial security
• Performance Bonus: Discretionary rewards that celebrate your impact
• Convenience at Work: Free reserved parking at the office
• Hybrid Work: A flexible arrangement with 2 days in the office and 3 days remote each week