Junior Site Reliability Engineer

SUMMARY:
Signa Opportunity 
is recruiting unemployed youth for quality workplace experience through the Youth Employment Service (YES) initiative.

POSITION INFO:
About the role
The position is responsible for contributing to the reliability, scalability, and performance of the company’s cloud-native infrastructure and production services. 

Responsibilities:

• System Monitoring & Observability
• Configure and maintain monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Datadog) to track key system metrics (latency, traffic, errors, saturation).
• Create and refine dashboards and alerts to ensure rapid detection of anomalies and potential outages.
• Assist in the implementation of distributed tracing and structured logging to improve debugging and performance analysis.

• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation as a secondary responder, escalating issues as needed to senior team members.
• Follow incident response playbooks to diagnose and mitigate production incidents, aiming to restore service within defined SLOs.
• Contribute to blameless post-incident reviews by documenting timelines, root causes, and action items to prevent recurrence.

• Develop and maintain automation scripts (Python, Go, or Bash) to streamline repetitive operational tasks such as certificate rotation, user access management, and log rotation.
• Assist in managing cloud infrastructure using IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation) to ensure consistent, version-controlled, and repeatable deployments.
• Support CI/CD pipeline improvements (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) to enable safe and efficient application deployments.

• Collect and analyse resource usage trends (CPU, memory, storage, network) to help forecast capacity needs and recommend scaling actions.
• Work with development teams to conduct load testing and identify performance bottlenecks.

• Partner with software engineers to implement service level indicators (SLIs) and define realistic service level objectives (SLOs).
• Document system architecture, operational runbooks, and common troubleshooting steps to empower the wider team.
• Actively participate in team agile ceremonies, providing input on reliability risks for upcoming features.

• Container Orchestration: Hands-on experience with Kubernetes (cluster administration, Helm charts, pod autoscaling) or Docker Swarm.
• Programming & Scripting: Proficiency in at least one high-level language (Python, Go) for automation and tooling; comfort with shell scripting.
• CI/CD Pipelines: Familiarity with building and maintaining deployment pipelines, including canary deployments, feature flags, and rollback strategies.
• Observability Stack: Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, or the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana).
• Networking: Working knowledge of load balancers (NGINX, HAProxy), DNS management, firewalls, and TCP/IP troubleshooting.
• Cloud Platforms: Exposure to AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, S3) or equivalent cloud provider services.
• Security Best Practices: Understanding of identity and access management (IAM), secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and basic security hardening.

• South African Unemployed youth between the ages of 18 and 34.
• Must not have participated on the YES programme before.
• Matric.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent demonstrable experience in a systems or software engineering role.

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate or equivalent cloud certification.
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or CKAD.
• Any SRE-related or DevOps training certifications.

• Solid understanding of Linux/Unix operating systems (systems, filesystems, process management, networking stack).
• Familiarity with at least one cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and its core compute, storage, and networking services.
• Basic understanding of version control systems (Git) and collaborative development workflows (pull requests, code reviews).

• Problem-solving mindset: Able to break down complex issues into manageable components and systematically debug under pressure.
• Ownership: Takes responsibility for tasks from inception to completion, with a focus on quality and reliability.
• Curiosity: Passionate about learning new technologies and staying current with industry best practices in SRE and cloud engineering.
• Communication: Effectively conveys technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and documents work clearly.
• Team collaboration: Works well in a cross-functional team environment, providing and receiving constructive feedback.