Aaliyah Petersen

S

VP of Engineering, Harbor Studio - Kubernetes · AWS · Linux

Harbor Studio
Cape Town, South Africa · SAST (UTC+2)
10+ years experience
University of the Witwatersrand
English, Afrikaans
Hiring
Messaging unavailable

Overview

23 years in software engineering, the last 1 at Harbor Studio, where I lead the infrastructure team. Grew the infrastructure team from 3 to 25 engineers. Before that: M-KOPA and Standard Bank.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Candidates for the role I'm hiring for
  • Thoughtful intros to people in my field
  • Questions about cloud infrastructure
  • Working sessions on AWS
Please don't message about
  • Unpaid work or spec projects
  • Requests to fix your code for free
  • Agency or outsourcing pitches
Skills
KubernetesAWSLinuxCLI design
HiringHiring for a role
closes in 3 months

Building out infrastructure at Harbor Studio: SREs wanted in Cape Town

Role
SRE
Level
Mid
Type
Full-time
Work mode
Hybrid
Compensation
$159k-$194k + equity
Team
Infrastructure, 12 people
Start
This quarter
Must have
Production experience with Linux Production experience with Kubernetes Good judgment about what not to build
Process
3 conversations, no take-home

Comp $203k-$264k. Three interviews over a week. Message me with one thing you shipped that you're proud of.

Cape Town, South Africa · remote OKcli designkubernetesaws
Open

Experience

  1. VP of Engineering
    May 2026 - Present
    Harbor Studio · 5 mo · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
    • Reduced cloud spend on infrastructure by 21% in two quarters.
    • Grew the infrastructure team from 4 to 39 engineers.
  2. Senior Site Reliability Engineer
    Sep 2023 - May 2026
    M-KOPA · 2 yr 8 mo · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
    • Shipped 22 launches on the infrastructure team without a rollback.
  3. Senior Engineering Manager
    Oct 2020 - Sep 2023
    Standard Bank · 2 yr 11 mo · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
    • Mentored 4 engineers through their first promotion.
    • Moved 78% of infrastructure traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
  4. Site Reliability Engineer
    Aug 2018 - Jun 2020
    Andela · 1 yr 10 mo · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
    • Reduced cloud spend on infrastructure by 34% in two quarters.
    • Shipped 7 launches on the infrastructure team without a rollback.
  5. Principal Engineer
    Sep 2016 - Aug 2018
    FirstRand · 1 yr 11 mo · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
    • Led or co-led 25 investments, 8 of them now at Series B or later.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. University of the Witwatersrand
    BSc, Information Technology
    1999 - 2003

Details

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