Quality & Reliability Engineer (QRE) (JHB Hybrid/Remote)
Engineering/Technical ~ IT – Software Development ~ IT – Infrastructure
Johannesburg – Gauteng – South Africa
ENVIRONMENT:
A revolutionary web-based application seeks the technical expertise of a Quality & Reliability Engineer (QRE) to ensure the platform delivers stable, secure, and high-quality software at pace. Serving as a bridge between Development, QA, and Operations, you will own the CI/CD pipelines, enforce quality gates, monitor reliability, and safeguard the platform against regressions, downtime, and technical debt. The ideal candidate will have strong experience with CI/CD tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab CI), familiarity with cloud platform pipelines (e.g., Heroku Pipelines) & be proficient in Python and Shell Scripting (bonus: Django familiarity). You must also be comfortable with observability tools (e.g., Sentry, etc) and have a track record of delivering reliable, secure systems in a SaaS or FinTech environment.
DUTIES:
CI/CD & Deployment –
- Maintain and improve continuous integration and delivery pipelines (GitHub Actions / Heroku).
- Automate test, linting, type-checking, and coverage enforcement gates.
- Deploy approved changes to staging and production environments.
- Own rollback procedures and ensure safe release practices (e.g. feature flags, canary rollouts).
Observability & Incident Response –
- Monitor production health (Sentry, logs, performance dashboards).
- Track SLIs/SLOs (e.g., error rates, MTTR, CFR) and report reliability metrics monthly.
- Prepare runbooks for common incidents; support the incident commander rotation.
Test Infrastructure & Quality Gates –
- Maintain and evolve automated test suites (Unit, Integration, Acceptance).
- Own flaky test backlog and test fixture/data generation tooling.
- Collaborate with Developers to ensure code is testable, isolated, and regression-safe.
Security & Platform Hardening –
- Integrate security scans, dependency checks (e.g., Dependabot), and audit trail features into CI/CD.
- Partner with the Security Champion to ensure releases meet internal standards and SOC 2 requirements.
- Contribute to infrastructure security posture (e.g., IAM scoping, key management, release audit logs).
Developer Experience & Release Tooling –
- Improve Developer productivity through tooling, sandbox environments, and local parity.
- Reduce cycle time from PR to production by identifying bottlenecks in the build or test stages.
Metrics you will own:
✓ CI duration and reliability.
✓ Change Failure Rate (CFR) and Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
✓ Defect escape rate and flaky test volume.
✓ Sentry alert volume and resolution latency.
✓ Release cadence and deployment success rate.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong experience with CI/CD tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab CI).
- Familiarity with cloud platform pipelines (e.g., Heroku Pipelines).
- Proficient in Python and Shell Scripting (bonus: Django familiarity).
- Experience maintaining test automation frameworks.
- Comfort with observability tools (e.g., Sentry, etc).
- Track record of delivering reliable, secure systems in a SaaS or FinTech environment.
Knowledge/Experience in the following areas will be beneficial, but not required:
✓ Experience with feature flag systems (e.g., Unleash, LaunchDarkly).
✓ Understanding of SOC 2 / ISO 27001 controls in CI/CD.
✓ Exposure to data privacy and multi-tenant architectures.
✓ Experience running post-mortems and tracking incident action items.
ATTRIBUTES:
Relentlessly pragmatic: You optimise for stability over perfection.
Systems thinker: You see failure modes before they happen.
Quality advocate: You know tests are not overhead, they’re leverage.
Security conscious: You think in terms of blast radius and defence-in-depth.
Quietly powerful: You make every Engineer faster without becoming a bottleneck.