Head of Infrastructure, DevOps & SRE Job Watu Credit

AI summary

Watu Credit is hiring a Head of Infrastructure, DevOps & SRE to lead a 7-person team owning cloud and on-premises infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and site reliability. This remote-first role based in Nairobi, Kenya involves occasional travel to Nairobi and Riga. Reporting to the CTO, you will manage AWS, EKS, GitHub Actions, and drive automation and reliability.

• Lead a 7-person Infrastructure, DevOps & SRE team.
• Remote-first role with occasional travel to Nairobi and Riga.
• Own cloud and on-premises infrastructure, K8s, and CI/CD.
• Key objective: exit partner dependency within first 6 months.
• Report directly to the CTO.

Description

Home » Jobs In Kenya » IT Jobs In Kenya » Head of Infrastructure, DevOps & SRE Job Watu Credit Job Title: Head of Infrastructure, DevOps & SRE Date Posted: 15/07/2026 Job Type: Remote Job Level: Management Employer: Watu Credit Industry: IT Salary: Open Location: Nairobi Country: Kenya Deadline: 31/07/2026 Summary: IT Jobs, Watu Credit Jobs. Looking for an IT job in Kenya? Watu Credit is hiring a Head of Infrastructure, DevOps & SRE skilled in cloud management, CI/CD automation, and site reliability. Job Summary This is a senior leadership hire that owns the entire deployment substrate at Watu. You will lead a 7-person Infrastructure, DevOps & SRE team responsible for cloud infrastructure, on-premises systems, Kubernetes operations, CI/CD pipelines, site reliability, and security engineering. The team is already designed – you are inheriting a defined structure and will immediately take ownership of it. Your first priority is standing it up, hiring the open positions, and asserting technical authority over the infrastructure layer across all engineering functions. You will report directly to the CTO and be a peer to the two Heads of Engineering. The clean boundary you are responsible for is: Infrastructure, DevOps & SRE owns the deployment substrate; the engineering squads build on top of it. Defending and maintaining that boundary is part of the job. This role is remote-first in Europe, reflecting where the existing Riga-based infrastructure team sits. You will travel occasionnally to Nairobi for market presence and to Riga for team operations. You will be expected to be fully available across both Central European and East African time zones during critical periods. Responsibilities Cloud & on-premises infrastructure Own the AWS cloud environment end-to-end: account structure, VPCs, IAM, cost optimisation, and architectural governance across all environments. Manage on-premises infrastructure in local markets alongside the cloud layer – hybrid architecture is a reality, not a transition state. Own the Kubernetes fleet: EKS in AWS and on-prem K8s clusters. Cluster lifecycle management, upgrades, autoscaling, workload isolation, and cost allocation. Exit (or reduce to pure added capacity only) the existing partner dependency and take full ownership of infrastructure operations – this is an explicit objective for the first 6 months. CI/CD and developer platform Own CI/CD infrastructure for all engineering squads (8 squads across CXE and Platform Engineering). GitHub Actions is the standard – you govern the pipelines, environments, and deployment patterns. Define and enforce deployment standards: environment promotion, feature flags, blue-green or canary patterns, rollback procedures. Act as the internal platform team for infrastructure concerns – squads should be able to deploy confidently without becoming infrastructure experts. Drive automation-first thinking: if a process is manual and repeatable, it should be automated. Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) is non-negotiable. Site reliability & on-call Own SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets across all production services. Define them in collaboration with engineering squads; hold the line on them operationally. Build and operate the on-call rotation for L3 escalations from the L2 Operations Center. L3 engineers come from the squads – you govern the process, tooling, and runbooks that make the rotation viable. Own incident response infrastructure: alerting, observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana, or equivalent), and the post-incident review process. Drive MTTR down over time – not through heroics, but through better observability, automated remediation, and runbook discipline. Networking & connectivity Own networking across all environments: VPCs, VPNs, peering, private connectivity to payment providers and third-party integrations. Manage connectivity to local market infrastructure – call systems, local monitoring agents, and market-specific network requirements are your problem to solve alongside the Head of IT. Own DNS, certificate management, and API gateway infrastructure. Security engineering Own infrastructure security: secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager or Vault), IAM least-privilege enforcement, network security groups, and vulnerability scanning at the infrastructure layer. Ensure OWASP compliance at the infrastructure level; own dependency scanning, container image scanning, and penetration testing cadence. Work with the Head of IT to ensure local market infrastructure and IT systems meet the same security baseline as the cloud platform. Team and people Lead and develop the 7-person team: Lead DevOps Engineer, Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, SRE/Cloud Security Engineer, Infrastructure & Network Engineer, two DevOps/Platform Engineers (Riga and Brazil). The Brazil hire provides LATAM timezone coverage and Africa off-hours backup – building and managing a distributed team across 3 continents is part of the job. Be the technica