AWS DevOps Consultant

Senior AWS DevOps Engineer

Contract | 12 months | Start: January 2027
Hybrid — Johannesburg

The Role

Lead the design, automation, security, reliability, and operational excellence of a production AWS platform. You’ll work closely with software engineering teams to enable secure, reliable software delivery while maintaining highly available cloud environments.

Focus: Cloud Infrastructure Engineering (40%) · DevOps & CI/CD (30%) · Automation & Software Engineering (30%)

What You’ll Do

• Design, implement, and optimise AWS cloud infrastructure with strong resilience and disaster recovery.
  
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
  
• Implement Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK and CloudFormation.
  
• Apply least-privilege and Zero Trust principles; manage encryption, KMS, Secrets Manager, and remediate security findings.
  
• Support production environments, participate in on-call, drive root-cause analysis, and improve platform reliability.
  
• Mentor engineers, review infrastructure and application code, and lead modernisation initiatives.
  

What You Bring

Preferred: 10+ years in Cloud Engineering, DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering, with strong production AWS experience at scale (enterprise, startup, or scale-up).

Alternative path considered: 6+ years with significant production ownership, deep AWS operational experience, strong automation capability, and rapid technical progression (startup/scale-up experience a plus).

Core AWS skills: ECS, Lambda, VPC, Route53, CloudFront, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, RDS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Organizations, cross-account architectures, and cloud security governance.

Also required:

• Infrastructure as Code and automation
  
• Security fundamentals (encryption, IAM, least privilege, Zero Trust, Security by Design)
  
• Databases: PostgreSQL and DynamoDB
  
• Comfortable reading, understanding, and modifying application code; developing automation tooling and scripts
  

Nice to have: EKS, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, CloudWatch, EventBridge, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, SonarQube, Snyk, Blue/Green deployments, and experience with AI-assisted engineering tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude).

What Makes You Stand Out

• Startup or scale-up experience
  
• Ownership of production AWS platforms
  
• Experience building cloud platforms from the ground up
  
• Cloud transformation or modernisation track record
  
• Strong automation background
  

Relevant tertiary qualification is advantageous but not essential. Equivalent practical experience will be considered.