Johannesburg: Junior Site Reliability Engineer

About the Role

The Junior Site Reliability Engineer position is an exciting opportunity to contribute to the reliability, scalability, and performance of our cloud-native infrastructure and production services. As a key member of our team, you will be responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of our systems and providing expert support to our development teams.

Key Responsibilities

• System Monitoring & Observability:
• Configure and maintain monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Datadog) to track key system metrics (latency, traffic, errors, saturation).
• Create and refine dashboards and alerts to ensure rapid detection of anomalies and potential outages.
• Incident Response & Management:
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation as a secondary responder, escalating issues as needed to senior team members.
• Follow incident response playbooks to diagnose and mitigate production incidents, aiming to restore service within defined SLOs.
• Contribute to blameless post-incident reviews by documenting timelines, root causes, and action items to prevent recurrence.
• Automation & Infrastructure as Code:
• Develop and maintain automation scripts (Python, Go, or Bash) to streamline repetitive operational tasks such as certificate rotation, user access management, and log rotation.
• Assist in managing cloud infrastructure using IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation) to ensure consistent, version-controlled, and repeatable deployments.
• Capacity Planning & Performance Tuning:
• Collect and analyse resource usage trends (CPU, memory, storage, network) to help forecast capacity needs and recommend scaling actions.
• Work with development teams to conduct load testing and identify performance bottlenecks.
• Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing:
• Partner with software engineers to implement service level indicators (SLIs) and define realistic service level objectives (SLOs).
• Document system architecture, operational runbooks, and common troubleshooting steps to empower the wider team.

Requirements

• Container Orchestration: Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (cluster administration, Helm charts, pod autoscaling) or Docker Swarm.
• Programming & Scripting: Proficiency in at least one high-level language (Python, Go) for automation and tooling; comfort with shell scripting.
• CI/CD Pipelines: Familiarity with building and maintaining deployment pipelines, including canary deployments, feature flags, and rollback strategies.
• Observability Stack: Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, or the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).
• Networking: Working knowledge of load balancers (NGINX, HAProxy), DNS management, firewalls, and TCP/IP troubleshooting.
• Cloud Platforms: Exposure to AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, S3) or equivalent cloud provider services.
• Security Best Practices: Understanding of identity and access management (IAM), secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and basic security hardening.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent demonstrable experience in a systems or software engineering role.

Salary & Benefits

Salary information not available.