Code for Africa (CfA) has an immediate vacancy for a full‑time Senior Platform Engineer in our Tech Lab. You will design the shared platform foundations, including cloud accounts and guardrails, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules and packages, CI/CD, observability and security stacks that power multiple CfA products. The successful candidate will join CfA’s Tech Lab as a Senior Technologist. Tech Lab is the innovative engine of CfA, driving the design, development, and maintenance of impactful, human-centred digital services and infrastructure.
Required: minimum requirements include:5+ years building production systems with Python/Type Script or system programming languages such as Rust (you build tools and services, not just scripts). Equivalent practical experience or a degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics or a related technical field. Strong AWS experience: Organisations/SSO, IAM guardrails, VPC networking, ECS/Fargate or Lambda, RDS, S3, Cloud Watch. IaC with Terraform (modules, workspaces/state, CI plan/apply) or similar tools such as Pulumi. CI/CD with Git Hub Actions (or similar) for containerised services; blue/green or canary with safe rollbacks. Observability and operations: metrics/logs/traces, actionable alerting, incident response and postmortems. Security fundamentals: least‑privilege IAM, secrets management, encryption/KMS, backups/Disaster Recovery drills. Excellent written and verbal communication in English; collaborative across time zones.
Preferred: candidates who are able to demonstrate the following will have an advantage:Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Data Science or a related technical field. Experience with Open Telemetry and Sentry; cloud-native custom-designed processors and other Fin Ops cost‑optimisation practices. Prior civic‑tech, media, or non‑profit experience; multi‑product/platform environments.
What You’ll Do:As a Senior Platform Engineer in our Tech Lab, you will focus on building the shared foundations that improve developer experience across our product lines. Your mission is to empower our product teams to ship services quickly and safely. You will:Own and Evolve CfA’s Cloud Foundations: Design and manage our multi-account AWS organization, including SSO/MFA, IAM guardrails, and Service Control Policies (SCPs). Build and Maintain “Golden Paths”: Create reusable service templates and IaC modules/packages for our core application patterns (e.g., web APIs on ECS/Fargate), complete with pre-configured logging, metrics, and alerts. Drive Reliability by Design: Champion and implement best practices like Service Level Objectives (SLOs), clear runbooks, blameless incident reviews, and meaningful, SLO-based alerting. Lead Cost Stewardship: Implement robust tagging, set up budgets and alerts, and lead monthly Fin Ops reviews to ensure we are running efficiently. Coach and Enable: Partner on security reviews, document platform choices, and run enablement sessions to help product engineers adopt these patterns.
Language and Location Requirements:Location: This position offers full remote flexibility, so we welcome applications from talented individuals throughout the Global South. Languages: English Preferred but not required: French, Arabic, KiSwahili, or other widely‑spoken African languages.
Equal Opportunity Statement:At CfA, we don’t just accept differences – we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. CfA is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.