Senior Platform Engineer at Code for Africa (CfA)

Required: minimum requirements include:

• 5+ years building production systems with Python/TypeScript 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, CloudWatch.  
• IaC with Terraform (modules, workspaces/state, CI plan/apply) or similar tools such as Pulumi.  
• CI/CD with GitHub 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 OpenTelemetry and Sentry; cloud-native custom-designed processors and other FinOps cost‑optimisation practices.
• Prior civic‑tech, media, or non‑profit experience; multi‑product/platform environments.

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.

About the Role:

The successful candidate will join CfA’s TechLab as a Senior Technologist. TechLab is the innovative engine of CfA, driving the design, development, and maintenance of impactful, human-centred digital services and infrastructure. In partnership with human rights-defending organisations, TechLab creates transformative technology solutions that empower communities, enhance civic engagement, and promote transparency and accountability in governance across Africa and beyond. By embracing human-centred principles, TechLab ensures that our digital platforms are not only user-friendly but also deeply resonant with the diverse needs and contexts of the communities we serve.

What You’ll Do:

As a Senior Platform Engineer in our TechLab, 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 FinOps 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.

What We Offer:

• A competitive salary, subject to experience, with opportunities for performance-based growth, both in terms of career path and public stature.
• Medical insurance cover, underwritten by a remote-first provider to ensure cover wherever you are
• A dynamic workplace, with a transnational team, occasional international travel, and generous vacation benefits.
• Ongoing opportunities to learn new cutting-edge skills and techniques/technologies to future-proof yourself in a rapidly evolving industry.
• A chance to shine on a global stage, writing for international audiences and interacting with colleagues around the world.