ABOUT LULA
Lula is on a mission to simplify business funding for South African SMEs. We build fast, digital-first fintech tools that make cash flow management seamless so business owners can focus on doing what they love. We’re a fast-growing, tech-driven team that values curiosity, collaboration, and high impact over red tape. Speaking of love, we’re looking for Lulas who love to make a difference to join our team and change the game.
CULTURE CODE
- We Embrace Curiosity - We continuously seek better ways to deliver value with a solutions-over-problems mindset.
- We win as One - We collaborate, build strong relationships and value diverse perspectives
- We’re Driven by Purpose - We are passionate and committed to delivering the best products and services for SMEs
- We Execute with Ambition - We set ambitious goals, embrace challenges, and deliver with focus and determination.
ROLE PURPOSE
We are building a small, focused innovation pod inside a fintech scale-up. The pod's job is to turn high-value ideas into production-ready capabilities quickly, then hand them to the teams who run them.
That only works if the path to production is solid. This role owns it: the pipelines, the environments, the deployment safety, and the observability to know something is wrong before the business does.
You will have senior platform and data engineering support around you, a pod lead, a senior colleague covering the platform and data seat, and a dedicated Data Engineering function to work with directly.
This is an early position with real influence over how the pod's operational foundations are built. You will shape the implementation; the pod's direction is set collaboratively with the lead.
If you like being the person who makes fast delivery safe, rather than the person who slows it down to achieve the same thing then this is the role for you.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for rapid, safe deployment
- Own the infrastructure layer on Azure: environments, configuration, secrets, networking
- Manage containerised workloads using Docker and Azure managed services
- Set up and maintain observability — logging, metrics, alerting — and use it to diagnose real production issues
- Execute database and schema migrations safely, with rollback paths that actually work
- Work alongside our Data Engineering function on the data platform the pod builds against
- Document what you build so production teams can inherit it
THE SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE WE’RE LOOKING FOR
- 3-5 years of experience in a similar role
- Production experience owning CI/CD pipelines end-to-end
- Hands-on with Docker and Azure managed services
- Practical observability skills; diagnosing live issues, not just standing up dashboards
- Experience running database or schema migrations in production, including when they go wrong
- Comfortable in a small team without a large platform function behind you
Advantageous:
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Pulumi or Bicep
- Fintech or other regulated-environment experience
- Exposure to modern data tooling such as dbt or Snowflake
- Interest in agentic or AI-assisted development workflows
- A habit of documenting decisions: ADRs, runbooks, incident write-ups