Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Engineering

Final date to receive applications: 26 November 2026

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Cape Town, SA

Reporting To: Josh Bryant

Compensation: R1.3M–R1.6M base per annum + a 10% annual bonus

Zappi helps some of the world’s biggest brands test ideas before they spend money bringing them to life. That means new products, ads, names, packaging and flavours. Our customers make big decisions on our data, so it has to be accurate, fast and affordable.

We make around $100M in revenue. Our product engineering team is about 90 people, based in London and Cape Town.

AI has changed how we write code. Throughput at Zappi keeps going up, and the bottleneck is moving to everything around the code. That means environments, config, deploys and access, plus keeping more and more of it running safely and cheaply.

That’s the space Platform Engineering works in. The team runs our core infrastructure and AI workloads, and builds the developer platform our engineers use to set up, deploy, configure and monitor their apps. Infrastructure and app setup are defined as data, which is what makes the platform flexible. In the last month, teams and automations completed over 20,000 deployments, 5,600 of them to production, all without needing us.

Anything we make easier gives time back to the rest of engineering.

Next, we want agents working on that same platform. Picture one that spots an error in production, spins up its own isolated environment with the right context, reproduces the issue and works out what’s wrong. It then either hands over a clear diagnosis or opens a pull request with the fix, and we can see and review every step. We can only do that if the platform is built for it.

Our Platform Engineering team runs that platform and builds what comes next. We’re looking for someone to lead it.

You’ll lead a team of five platform and SRE engineers, working as one team across two areas.

Core Infrastructure. Keep our infrastructure and AI workloads reliable, secure, current and cost-effective. That means self-managed clusters built with kOps on EC2, everything in Terraform, and Git Ops deploys. We already run GPU workloads and self-hosted models in production, and you’ll help teams work out when open-source models beat calling an API.

Developer Experience. Build the tooling that lets teams ship without us in the loop, for people and agents alike. Our in-house developer platform sits at the centre of it. Several projects are already under way:

• Getting environments the data they need, so nobody loses time waiting for a place to build & test.
• Moving app setup and configuration out of code and into data, so teams can change it without a pull request.
• Making a new environment something you ask for and get in about ten minutes.
• Making sure anything an engineer can do to their app, an agent can do too, with the correct safety guardrails.

You’ll help decide how agents work safely here: what they can do on their own, where the guardrails sit, and how we keep an audit trail.

Lead the team. You’ll coach and grow engineers with a mix of experience, alongside strong technical leads. You’ll run technical discussions, make the calls with your team, write code where it matters most, and step in when things break. You’ll work with engineers, other EMs and leadership to set the roadmap, and own the rollout when things ship. You’ll also run the team’s support rotation, and reduce it over time by turning common requests into self-serve tools.

• We ship small changes all day. We use trunk-based development and have no release trains.
• Teams own their services, on-call included. Your team’s job is to make that easy.
• We use AI tools every day, and we…