ABOUT ALU
ALU provides higher education for a higher purpose. Our students declare missions, not majors.They develop the real-world skills to take on the world’s most pressing challenges. And they take ownership of their learning from day one through our peer and student-led approach – because ALU believes in the power and agency of young people to start shaping the future right now. Together with a world-class faculty and staff, our students are igniting a ripple of positive impact across Africa and the world.
We are dedicated to fostering an open yet secure environment, balancing the safety of students, staff, and visitors with respect for individual rights, and safeguarding responsibilities.
HOW WE WORK
The ALU Team works in starkly different ways to traditional academic bureaucracies. We approach education from first principles, empower individuals to design, test, and implement creative new ideas, and work closely together to craft transformative learning experiences. We are deeply passionate about our students and excited by the challenge of building something entirely new.
The African Leadership University is committed to ensuring the safety and Well-being of all students under our care. As part of this commitment , we have a comprehensive safeguarding policy in place , which outlines our Zero-tolerance approach to any violation of safeguarding.
ABOUT THE ROLE
ALU is looking for a hands-on Cloud, DevOps & Integration Engineer to take ownership of its AWS environment, and enterprise integrations. The role will help stabilise and improve an environment that includes vendor-built services, critical data flows and integrations across Salesforce, AWS, learning platforms, databases and other enterprise systems.
The successful candidate will combine strong cloud operations and integration troubleshooting skills with practical Salesforce DevOps experience. A key part of the role is building internal capability through better monitoring, automation, documentation and knowledge transfer, reducing reliance on external vendors for routine support.
Key responsibilities
AWS and cloud operations
- Manage and support production and non-production AWS environments, including EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, AppFlow, ElastiCache and related services.
- Monitor infrastructure health, performance, availability and cost, and resolve operational issues before they materially affect users.
- Review access controls, security groups, network configuration, secrets, backups and disaster recovery arrangements.
- Automate repetitive cloud, deployment and operational activities using Infrastructure as Code and scripting.
- Identify practical opportunities to improve reliability, security and AWS cost efficiency.
Integrations and platform reliability
- Own the operational support and continuous improvement of integrations between Salesforce, AWS, learning platforms, databases and other enterprise applications.
- Reverse-engineer and document existing integrations, Lambdas, AppFlow processes, databases and technical dependencies where documentation is incomplete.
- Investigate failures across APIs, authentication, data mappings, scheduled jobs, event-driven processes and connected systems.
- Implement effective logging, monitoring, alerting, retry, reconciliation and failure-handling mechanisms.
- Identify silent failures, incomplete data transfers and recurring incidents, and implement permanent corrective actions.
- Review vendor-built solutions for supportability, security, maintainability and technical debt.
Salesforce DevOps and release engineering
- Manage Salesforce deployments across development, testing and production environments.
- Maintain source-driven development and Git-based version control.
- Build and support CI/CD pipelines for Salesforce releases.
- Troubleshoot metadata, Apex, Lightning, Flow, permission and deployment issues.
- Support Salesforce APIs, integration users, authentication and platform limits.
- Work with administrators, developers and QA to improve release quality and reduce manual deployments.
Candidates should have practical experience with Salesforce CLI and Salesforce DevOps tooling. Experience with Gearset, Copado, Flosum or similar tools would be advantageous.
Documentation, incidents and collaboration
- Maintain architecture diagrams, integration inventories, operational runbooks and recovery procedures.
- Participate in incident management, root-cause analysis and follow-through on corrective actions.
- Work with implementation partners during transition and ensure sufficient knowledge is transferred to the internal team.
- Collaborate with the Platform Director, QA Lead, Salesforce team, functional teams and business system owners.
- Provide clear technical updates, identify risks early and take ownership of issues through to resolution.
Ensure the safety and well-being of all young persons and vulnerable adults with whom we deal, by adhering to ALU’s comprehensive safeguarding policy, maintaining a zero-tolerance approach to any violations of safeguarding standards
Required experience and capabilities
- At least four years of experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, systems integration or a related engineering role.
- Hands-on experience supporting production AWS environments and services such as EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, IAM and CloudWatch.
- Strong experience troubleshooting integrations across APIs, cloud services, applications, databases and authentication layers.
- Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, Git-based source control and structured release processes.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK or a similar tool.
- Scripting experience using Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Bash or a similar language.
- Sound understanding of monitoring, logging, cloud security, backup and disaster recovery practices.
- Ability to understand and improve existing solutions that may be complex or not fully documented.
- Strong ownership, analytical problem-solving and communication skills.
Advantageous experience
- Integrating Salesforce with AWS services.
- AWS AppFlow, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, API Gateway or containerised workloads.
- Salesforce Platform Events or Change Data Capture.
- Automated testing tools such as Playwright.
- Student Information Systems, learning platforms such as Canvas, or education technology environments.
- Transitioning services and knowledge from external vendors to internal teams.
- Relevant AWS, Salesforce or integration certifications.
What success looks like
- Critical AWS services and integrations have clear ownership, documentation and monitoring.
- Integration failures are detected and resolved quickly, with fewer recurring incidents.
- Salesforce and cloud deployments are controlled, traceable and increasingly automated.
- Backup, recovery and operational procedures are documented and tested.
- The internal team can confidently operate the environment with reduced dependence on external vendors.
