DevOps & Platform Engineer

About the Role

Lula is on a mission to simplify business funding for South African SMEs. We build fast, digital-first fintech tools that make cash flow management seamless so business owners can focus on doing what they love. We’re a fast-growing, tech-driven team that values curiosity, collaboration, and high impact over red tape. Speaking of love, we’re looking for Lulas who love to make a difference to join our team and change the game.

Responsibilities

• We are building a small, focused innovation pod inside a fintech scale-up. The pod's job is to turn high-value ideas into production-ready capabilities quickly, then hand them to the teams who run them.
• That only works if the path to production is solid. This role owns it: the pipelines, the environments, the deployment safety, and the observability to know something is wrong before the business does.
• You will have senior platform and data engineering support around you, a pod lead, a senior colleague covering the platform and data seat, and a dedicated Data Engineering function to work with directly.
• This is an early position with real influence over how the pod's operational foundations are built. You will shape the implementation; the pod's direction is set collaboratively with the lead.
• If you like being the person who makes fast delivery safe, rather than the person who slows it down to achieve the same thing then this is the role for you.
• We Embrace Curiosity - We continuously seek better ways to deliver value with a solutions-over-problems mindset.
• We win as One - We collaborate, build strong relationships and value diverse perspectives
• We’re Driven by Purpose - We are passionate and committed to delivering the best products and services for SMEs
• We Execute with Ambition - We set ambitious goals, embrace challenges, and deliver with focus and determination.
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for rapid, safe deployment
• Own the infrastructure layer on Azure: environments, configuration, secrets, networking
• Manage containerised workloads using Docker and Azure managed services
• Set up and maintain observability
• logging, metrics, alerting
• and use it to diagnose real production issues
• Execute database and schema migrations safely, with rollback paths that actually work
• Work alongside our Data Engineering function on the data platform the pod builds against
• Document what you build so production teams can inherit it
• 3-5 years of experience in a similar role
• Production experience owning CI/CD pipelines end-to-end
• Hands-on with Docker and Azure managed services
• Practical observability skills; diagnosing live issues, not just standing up dashboards
• Experience running database or schema migrations in production, including when they go wrong
• Comfortable in a small team without a large platform function behind you
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Pulumi or Bicep
• Fintech or other regulated-environment experience
• Exposure to modern data tooling such as dbt or Snowflake
• Interest in agentic or AI-assisted development workflows
• A habit of documenting decisions: ADRs, runbooks, incident write-ups