Senior DevOps & Platform Engineer Cape Town, ZA

Jody Wicomb

Builder of payment infrastructure that never sleeps.

Twenty-five years shaping fintech from the ground up — from ISO 8583 message parsing at South Africa's biggest payment network to architecting Kubernetes clusters processing millions of transactions daily. I don't just maintain systems; I build the tools nobody thought to build yet.

25+
Years fintech
4K+
Store endpoints
26
RDS clusters
JW
Currently shipping
"I build things before the mandate exists to build them — and by the time anyone notices, they're already in production."
EKS / Kubernetes Payment Infrastructure MySQL at Scale Fraud Detection Crypto Gateways AI Tooling ISO 8583 Python / Node.js
Section 01 The Arsenal
STACK & EXPERTISE

Full-stack infrastructure ownership, from a single RDS index to a multi-cluster VPC spanning three AWS regions.

I've spent a career operating at the intersection of reliability engineering and product delivery — the person who owns the pager, writes the runbook, builds the tooling to make the alert go away permanently, and then ships the feature that makes the whole thing faster.

At Shoprite, I manage payment infrastructure that cannot go down. Tens of thousands of POS endpoints. 4,000+ stores. Reconciliation pipelines that must be exact to the cent. The systems I build aren't demos — they're the actual rails that move money through South Africa.

Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS EKS RDS MySQL S3 VPC / CNI NAT Gateways IAM CloudWatch AWS Backup
Containers & Orchestration
Kubernetes Docker Helm Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines
Backend & Data
Python / Flask Node.js / Express MySQL PostgreSQL PrestoDB ISO 8583 REST / WebSockets
Observability & Security
Datadog Grafana Fraud Detection AML Tooling Threat Analysis
Blockchain & AI
XRP Ledger Bitcoin Ethereum / Solana Ollama / LLMs Anthropic API RAG Systems
"Part of the RDS Aurora team at AWS before it became generally available. Built zero-downtime database migration strategies when most engineers were still reading about them."
— Career Highlights
Section 02 The Journey
CAREER TIMELINE
2022
Present
Shoprite
Senior DevOps Engineer III — MMP Platform
Owns the Money Market Platform payment infrastructure serving 4,000+ stores and tens of thousands of POS endpoints across South Africa. Manages EKS clusters, 26 MySQL RDS databases, CI/CD pipelines, reconciliation systems, and a fraud detection platform called USAVE — built from scratch. Solved a critical VPC IP exhaustion crisis by implementing custom CNI networking with a secondary RFC 6598 CIDR block, eliminating risk to live payment processing.
EKS Production 26 RDS instances Fraud Platform VPC CNI Engineering Recon Pipelines
2020
2 yrs
BloqTech
Senior DevOps Engineer — Blockchain Infrastructure
Joined as the infrastructure engineer handling a full spectrum of duties: customer issue resolution, cloud migrations, and the live migration of crypto nodes from OVH to AWS. Integrated fiat and crypto payment systems. Built operational tooling and observability infrastructure for blockchain-native financial services.
Crypto Node Migration Fiat & Crypto Integrations AWS Migration
2017
3 yrs
JUMO
TechOps → SDE → Senior Development Engineer
Joined as TechOps with a focus on database engineering and automation, promoted twice in three years. Designed and implemented a database migration strategy executed with zero downtime — a high-stakes, high-visibility achievement in a fintech operating at scale. Also planned and built an internal ticketing and operations system.
Zero-Downtime DB Migration Database Automation 3 Promotions
2015
2 yrs
Amazon
Cloud Support Engineer → Systems Development Engineer
Entered as a Cloud Support engineer specialising in RDS. Moved to EC2 engineering as a systems development engineer with a focus on automation and software deployments across the AWS EC2 fleet. Was part of the RDS Aurora team before Aurora reached general availability — working on what would become one of AWS's flagship database products.
RDS Aurora (Pre-GA) EC2 Fleet Automation AWS Internal Systems
2001
14 yrs
EasyPay
Operational Support → Fintech Specialist
Where it all started. A 14-year career spanning operational support, ISO 8583 protocol work, and eventually leading the Value Added Services vertical — from concept to delivery. Shaped the infrastructure behind Gift Cards, TV Licences, and Electricity Services for one of South Africa's largest payment processors. The deepest possible immersion in how money actually moves.
ISO 8583 Value Added Services Gift Cards Electricity Services
Side Projects & Independent Ventures
Section 03 Ships Outside Office Hours
PROJECTS
01
ColorCrypto
South African Crypto Payment Gateway
Real-time crypto payment infrastructure supporting XRP with multi-chain expansion. Handles transaction detection, validation, and reconciliation with WebSockets and database-backed processing. Pursuing FSCA CASP licensing with full SARS compliance.
02
BitBrands.io
Crypto-to-Luxury Commerce
Umbrella for BitDials.eu and BitCars.eu — platforms facilitating high-value luxury transactions paid in cryptocurrency. Operational since 2016 with significant transaction history across watches, vehicles, and premium goods.
03
USAVE Fraud Platform
Internal AI-Driven Fraud Detection
Built from scratch at Shoprite. Rule-based transaction monitoring, repeat signal detection, AML categorisation, and a custom analytics UI. Presented internally as the proof-of-concept for a formal "Operational Intelligence Engineering" function.
04
MSTR.studio
AI Audio Mastering App
Local audio mastering application with waveform/spectrum visualisation and LLM-powered auto-mastering via the Anthropic API. Flask/Python backend. Built because the tools that existed weren't good enough for a music producer who also writes the code.
05
Posterboard
Infinite SVG Canvas Viewer
Flask/S3/Cloudflare-powered infinite canvas for idea mapping and project planning. Custom SVG rendering with zoomable canvas interaction and waitlist landing page at posterboard.co.za.
06
Corporate RAG System
Self-Hosted AI / Knowledge Base
Experimental enterprise AI system using Ollama, Qdrant, and MCP servers enabling natural language queries against internal business data and transactional databases. Produces structured CSV and report outputs. Built before the mandate existed.
Engineering Philosophy
BUILD THE THING
NOBODY ASKED FOR
YET
The tools that matter most are the ones that get built before anyone realises they're needed.
Automation First
If a human is doing something repetitive, that human's time is being wasted. Every operational task is a candidate for elimination. Scripts, pipelines, and self-healing systems are the output — not heroics.
Full Lifecycle Ownership
I write it, deploy it, monitor it, fix it at 2am, and improve it until it doesn't need fixing anymore. No ticket left open, no alert left unresolved without a permanent fix.
Production Clarity
Systems I build are designed to be understood. Runbooks exist. Logs make sense. The next engineer shouldn't need to reverse-engineer what I built at midnight.
LET'S
TALK.
Open to senior and principal-level roles in infrastructure, platform engineering, and fintech. Cape Town-based, remote-friendly.
Location Cape Town, South Africa
Website wicomb.co.za
Focus DevOps · Platform · Fintech · Crypto