Site Reliability Engineer, pawaPay

• 5+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering roles
• Strong experience operating production systems with real uptime and reliability requirements
• Experience with distributed systems and understanding of failure modes at scale
• Deep knowledge of AWS (e.g. EKS, networking, IAM, scaling patterns, observability)
• Strong production grade experience with Kubernetes and Helm
• Experience with Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g. Go, Python, Bash)
• Experience with monitoring and observability tooling (metrics, logs)
• Strong problem-solving skills and a proactive, ownership-driven mindset
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English

Desirable

• As a Site Reliability Engineer at pawaPay, you will own the reliability and scalability of a high-throughput payments platform operating across fragmented and often unreliable external systems
• You will design and operate systems that process millions of transactions daily, ensuring low latency, high availability, and strict consistency — even under failure conditions
• This is not a traditional DevOps role. You will be responsible for ensuring that payments either succeed or fail cleanly, never leaving the system in an inconsistent state, while maintaining performance and resilience at scale
• Own the reliability, availability, and performance of the production payments platform
• Participate in on-call rotations to ensure system availability
• Define, implement, and continuously improve SLOs, SLAs, and alerting
• Design systems for failure (graceful degradation, retries, idempotency, backoff strategies)
• Lead incident response end-to-end, including postmortems and preventative improvements
• Improve system observability across metrics, logging, and distributed tracing
• Build and maintain scalable infrastructure using infrastructure as code
• Automate operational workflows to reduce manual intervention and increase system resilience
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to ensure reliability is built into system design
• You will be working on systems where:
• Failure must be atomic — no partial or inconsistent transaction states
• Latency directly impacts conversion and merchant trust
• External dependencies (telcos, banks, mobile money providers) are unreliable and vary by market
• Traffic can spike unpredictably and must be absorbed without degradation
• Observability and incident response are critical to maintaining SLAs
• What success looks like:
• Systems remain stable under sudden traffic spikes and partial infrastructure failures
• Incidents are resolved quickly with clear root cause and follow-up improvements
• Strong observability provides clear insight into system behaviour
• SLOs are well-defined, measurable, and consistently met
• Payments either succeed or fail cleanly — never leaving inconsistent states