Cape Town: Senior Computer Systems Engineer (CPT) posted by DataFin Recruitment

About the Role

Our client, a prominent organisation focused on supporting research advancement and human capital development through funding programmes, research infrastructure, and science outreach initiatives across a broad range of disciplines, is seeking a Senior Computer Systems Engineer to guide infrastructure development, mentor team members, and ensure systems align with their principles. The successful candidate will play a key role in cross-team collaboration, driving innovation while supporting sustainable and resilient computing environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to the global design and implementation of scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure systems that support engineering and operational needs.
• Contribute to the deployment, configuration, and maintenance of distributed storage and database systems.
• Analyse system failures, performance issues, and misconfigurations across hardware, software, and network layers.
• Lead and mentor computer systems engineers and contribute to strategic technical planning.

Requirements

### Qualification:

• BTech in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electronic Engineering or equivalent qualifications, coupled with 13 years of experience;
• BENG/MTech in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electronic Engineering or equivalent qualifications, coupled with 9 years of experience;
• MENG in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electronic Engineering or equivalent qualifications, coupled with 7 years of experience;
• PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electronic Engineering or equivalent qualifications, coupled with 5 years of experience.

### Experience:

• 3+ years in a technical leadership or software/system architectural role with direct responsibility for large-scale or platform-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience in infrastructure design and automation, distributed systems, observability, CI/CD, container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), DevOps/SRE practices, and cloud-native technologies.

### Knowledge:

• In-depth understanding of systems engineering principles, including performance optimisation, fault tolerance, and resource scheduling in Linux-based environments.
• Strong knowledge of containerised environments (Docker, Podman), orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, Helm), and runtime architectures (containerd, CRI).
• Expertise in infrastructure-as-code, continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), and configuration management tools (e.g., GitLab CI, Ansible, Terraform, ArgoCD).
• Advanced understanding of distributed computing and storage architectures, including Ceph, S3, NFS, and local/clustered file systems.
• Operational and architectural fluency in relational and NoSQL database systems (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB), including replication, backups, and performance tuning.

Qualifications

No qualifications mentioned in the original job description.