Cloud Engineer

PayInc is a purpose-driven payments provider building on over 50 years of trusted history in South Africas payments ecosystem. Our mission is to connect people businesses and economies through secure efficient and inclusive digital payments infrastructure and be a catalyst for financial inclusion and economic growth. PayInc provides the backbone that enables money to move safely across the economy via payment streams such as but not limited to EFT Card and PaySharp. At our core we exist to make great connections empowering participation enabling growth and ensuring no one is left behind.

Purpose:
The Senior Cloud Engineer plays a pivotal role in solutioning designing implementing and optimizing our cloud and hosted infrastructure to empower the organizations continuous digital transformation. This role contributes toward the scalability security and reliability of our cloud-based and hosted services. It enables agility rapid innovation and drives efficiencies within the cloud infrastructure that underpins mission-critical payment clearing platforms
Key focus areas include SLA100 regulatory compliance such as PCI operational excellence and cost-efficient infrastructure while enabling innovation through automation infrastructure as code and modern cloud engineering practices across multi-cloud environments.

You will engage with the following stakeholders
Internal
The role collaborates with multiple internal governance business and technical delivery teams including:

• Application owners and product teams
• ICT management
• IT Operations Security and IT Governance teams
• Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE)
• Enterprise governance structures such as but not limited to:
• Enterprise Design Authority
• Change Advisory Board (CAB)
• Risk Committee
• IT Compliance and Audit teams

External
The role engages with a variety of external stakeholders across the financial and technology ecosystem including:

• Financial industry participants such as banks and non-bank institutions
• Cloud service providers and technology vendors
• Regulatory authorities and industry compliance bodies
• Potential customers and payment ecosystem participants
• Strategic suppliers and vendors involved in project delivery support and maintenance

Your key responsibilities include:

• Provide expert support across core PyInc hosting platforms by demonstrating innovative and pioneer thinking in area of expertise. Translate this into design solutions and/or working practice improvements within the technical domain
• Actively contribute to the design and deployment of scalable highly available and fault-tolerant platforms for the hosting of PayInc services.
• Collaborate with architecture teams to implement approved infrastructure patterns and solutions.
• Support governance bodies with technical insight and infrastructure risk considerations.
• Vet all technical requirements and details for new ventures technical design changes and functional specifications within the Cloud Compute domain and provide infrastructure expertise and guidance to Cloud Engineers.
• Engineer highly available and fault-tolerant hosting platforms and landing zones capable of supporting critical payments infrastructure. Ensure build alignment with enterprise architecture governance standards and PayInc IT strategy.
• Collaborate with internal and external teams to understand requirements and provide secure fault-tolerant and scalable solutions through resilient architecture that adheres to industry controls and best practices.
• Support application and other technical teams in adopting cloud-native design patterns and deployment approaches.
• Identify automation opportunities and drive the automation of infrastructure operations configuration and deployment processes using tools such as but not limited to Terraform Ansible or CloudFormation.
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks to standardize infrastructure provisioning and version control.
• Evaluate and propose enhancements to IaC tooling repository structures and lifecycle management practices to increase consistency and reduce operational risk.
• Contribute to the multi-cloud platform strategy and enablement. Identify and enable solutions that support interoperability across cloud providers.
• Monitor system performance and proactively optimize resources propose architectural improvements that balance performance resilience and cost efficiency.
• Identify cost-effective technologies and architectural approaches for hosting and scaling PayInc hosting platforms.
• Contribute to FinOps initiatives to improve financial visibility and cloud spend optimization.
• Drive the Compute teams process of defining standardized infrastructure blueprints for consistent platform deployment.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues related to multi-cloud infrastructure. Participate in incident response and problem management. Assist other technical areas in root cause analysis
• Stay updated with emerging technologies trends and assess their applicability to PayIncs infrastructure needs.
• Maintain strict compliance with financial industry regulations and security standards processes policies & procedures.
• Ensure infrastructure alignment with industry security requirements and internal security policies.
• Contribute to the development and continuous improvement of cloud standards policies processes and procedures including:
  • Code management standards
  • Security and compliance frameworks
  • PCI alignment
  • Architectural governance
  • Cloud operational processes
• Maintain SLA100 operational readiness through proactive monitoring alerting and infrastructure resilience.
• Drive audit readiness by maintaining traceable and documented infrastructure configurations.
• Participate in security reviews vulnerability management and drive remediation activities.
• Create documentation and provide guidance to internal teams on cloud best practices and usage.

QUALIFICATIONS/KNOWLEDGE

• Bachelors Degree in one of the following fields:
  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Information Systems
  • IT engineering or related discipline
• AWS Certifications (Strongly Preferred):
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional
  • AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty
  • AWS Certified Security Specialty
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate
  • Multi-Cloud architecture certifications or equivalent experience
• Infrastructure as Code & DevOps Certifications (Advantageous)
  • HashiCorp Terraform Certification
  • Kubernetes Certifications (CKA / CKAD)
  • Docker certifications
  • Git or DevOps platform certifications
• Masters degree advantageous

EXPERIENCE

• Minimum 5 years experience in senior cloud engineering roles covering:
  • Cloud infrastructure support
  • Cloud platform configuration
  • Cloud architecture design
  • Platform deployment and build engineering
• Minimum 3 years experience in a technical leadership role guiding engineers and supporting platform engineering initiatives
• Minimum 1 year working experience in multi-cloud environments
  • Exposure to Microsoft Azure and other cloud providers advantageous
• Demonstrated experience in:
  • Cloud platform architecture and deployment
  • Infrastructure scalability and performance optimization
  • Designing highly available and fault-tolerant systems
  • Implementing DevOps and automation practices
  • Managing infrastructure through Infrastructure as Code.
• Strong hands-on experience with technologies such as:
  • Amazon EKS / Kubernetes
  • Docker container platforms
  • Serverless architectures
  • Amazon RDS and database platform services
  • Virtual networking and secure connectivity
  • OpenStack environments
  • High-availability and distributed systems
• Terraform
• Git-based repository management
• Infrastructure code lifecycle management
• CI/CD integration for infrastructure deployment
• Configuration management and automation frameworks cloud design and implementation knowledge across domains including policies frameworks and standards.
• Understanding of networking technologies and virtual networks
• Cloud security knowledge: Compliance standards and best practices