Positions in: Remote across the Global South (hubs in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa), UTC-1 to UTC+4 preferred.
Do you want to use your engineering superpowers to safeguard democracies and empower citizens across Africa?
Code for Africa (CfA) has an immediate vacancy for a full‑time Senior Platform Engineer in our TechLab. 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 TechLab spearheads the design, development and maintenance of all digital services and infrastructure for CfA, and its external human rights defending partner organisations.
Successful candidates are builders who automate toil, document clearly, and enable product teams to ship safely and quickly. You are comfortable juggling multiple products, and can translate reliability and cost goals into pragmatic platform patterns.
Candidates must be fluent in English, and candidates who are fluent in an additional international language, such as French or Arabic, or at least one local language from their country of residence will have an advantage.
The successful candidates will work as part of a multinational and multilingual team using digital collaboration tools to create content for a global audience and international media partners.
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.
What to expect during hiring
- 60‑minute culture/technical screen.
- A 2–3 hour take‑home exercise (at your convenience within a 72‑hour window).
- 60‑minute assignment review, values and leadership interview.
How to apply:
Please fill in this form.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Priority consideration will be given to candidates who apply by 7 January.
About Us:
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of indigenous African civic technology and investigative data journalism laboratories, with over 120 staff in 26 countries, who build digital democracy solutions that are intended to give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and that strengthen civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.
This includes building infrastructure such as the continent’s largest open data portal, open.AFRICA, and largest open source civic software portal, commons.AFRICA, as well as the largest repository of investigative document-based evidence, source.AFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network that gives citizens their own ‘eyes in the sky’, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in 12 African countries, and the sensors.AFRICA remote-sensing citizen science initiative to combat air/water pollution.
CfA also incubates the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), as an association of the continent’s best investigative newsrooms, ranging from large traditional mainstream media to smaller specialist units. ANCIR member newsrooms investigate crooked politicians, organised crime and big business. The iLAB is ANCIR’s in-house digital forensic unit, with teams in east, south and west Africa. ANCIR uses its resources to strengthen newsrooms’ own internal capacity, by providing access to the world’s best whistleblower encryption and investigative semantic analysis technologies, as well as skills development, and seed grants for cross-border collaboration.
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.
To all recruitment agencies: CfA does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our employment application line, CfA employees or any other CfA contact. CfA is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
Please note: Due to high volumes of applications, we are unable to respond to each one individually. If you are selected for an interview, we will contact you.