Job Description

At KingMakers, we're not here to follow the industry, we're here to define it.
We are a proudly homegrown African company, building the future of sports and iGaming entertainment across the continent. Since our launch in 2018, we've created platforms that connect millions of fans to the excitement they love through our leading brands, BetKing and SuperSportBet.
From Nigeria to South Africa, we've rapidly grown into a powerhouse, recognized for raising standards, pushing boundaries, and shaping what's next in our industry. Our vision is bold: to be the home where Africa plays.
Collaboration, innovation, and fearless execution define our culture. Every decision is purposeful, every interaction impactful, and every product designed to serve our players and partners with excellence.
We move fast, stay curious, and constantly raise the bar. Our mission is to deliver entertainment with integrity, innovation, and impact, because great products can change how entire communities experience play.
We're looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer who thrives at the intersection of coding and infrastructure. This isn't a traditional DevOps role, you'll be embedded directly into product squads, contributing to their codebases, making pull requests, and helping teams level up their observability, reliability, and performance.
If you love learning new systems, enjoy writing production-grade code, and want to shape how engineering squads build, scale, and operate software, we'd love to hear from you.
What you'll do

• Provide technical leadership across platform and product engineering, setting the direction for observability, reliability, security, and platform architecture.
• Contribute hands-on to critical product and platform codebases (primarily .NET and React), focusing on high-leverage improvements rather than feature throughput.
• Define and drive the organisation-wide observability strategy, including standards and best practices for OpenTelemetry (OTEL), telemetry pipelines, and signal quality.
• Partner with senior engineers and engineering leadership to design scalable, resilient infrastructure using Terraform, AKS, and Azure.
• Establish and champion security-by-default practices across code, infrastructure, and CI/CD -- influencing architecture, not just implementation.
• Lead the definition of SLIs, SLOs, and alerting strategies, ensuring reliability is measurable, actionable, and aligned with business outcomes.
• Set standards for monitoring and dashboards in Grafana, ensuring clarity, signal quality, and consistency across teams.
• Design and build shared tooling, platforms, and libraries that materially improve developer productivity and reduce cognitive load.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor and bridge between product engineering, platform engineering, and leadership -- shaping decisions through influence rather than authority.
• Mentor senior engineers and help raise the overall engineering bar through design reviews, architectural guidance, and pragmatic coaching.

Requirements

• Deep, production-grade programming experience in at least one major language -- C#/.NET strongly preferred; Go, Python, or similar also valued.
• A track record of designing, reviewing, and evolving complex production systems at scale.
• Extensive experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and Kubernetes-based platforms (AKS).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD systems and deployment strategies, ideally using Azure DevOps.
• Excellent grasp of networking fundamentals (TCP, HTTP, headers, tracing, and real-world debugging).
• Proven experience designing secure systems, including identity, access management, secrets handling, and secure pipelines.
• Experience operating in medium-to-large engineering organisations where reliability, scale, and developer experience matter.
• The ability to operate autonomously, identify high-impact problems, and drive solutions end-to-end.
• Clear communication skills -- able to explain complex technical trade-offs to engineers and non-engineers alike.

Nice to have

• Deep hands-on experience with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience designing or operating large-scale telemetry, monitoring, or logging systems.
• Strong database knowledge (SQL Server, NoSQL, performance and reliability considerations).
• Experience with Nginx, ingress controllers, or load balancing technologies.
• A security-first mindset balanced with pragmatism, performance, and developer velocity.
• Experience working across distributed or remote teams and influencing without direct authority.

How you do it - Expectations for fulfilling your role:
At KingMakers, how we do things matters as much as what we do. We live by our CROWNS values, and you'll thrive here if you:

• Customer First - You keep our customers at the center of every decision.
• Raise the Bar - You push for better, smarter, more innovative solutions.
• Operate with Candor - You're open, honest, and direct, always playing the ball, not the person.
• We Build Together - You collaborate across teams and borders to win as one.
• No Hesitation, Never Reckless - You move fast, take bold steps, but never compromise on responsibility.
• Speed & Iteration - You value momentum, continuous learning, and progress over perfection.

Benefits

• Health Support: A monthly allowance to invest in your health and wellbeing
• Comprehensive Insurance: Extra protection and peace of mind for you and your loved ones
• Future Planning: Employer contributions towards your long-term financial security
• Performance Bonus: Discretionary rewards that celebrate your impact
• Convenience at Work: Free reserved parking at the office
• Hybrid Work: A flexible arrangement with 2 days in the office and 3 days remote each week

Skills Required