Kenai Platform

Senior Platform Developer

Kenai HRon
3 min. read

Location

Cape Town or Johannesburg (Hybrid) — Remote considered for exceptional candidates

About Kenai

Kenai is building the future of secure, intelligent workplaces. Our AI-native platform helps enterprises manage visitor access, safety inductions, evacuations, and compliance — trusted by leading banks, estates, and data centres. We’re scaling fast and need exceptional engineers to help us design systems that can grow to thousands of sites globally.

The Role

As a Senior Platform Developer, you’ll take ownership of Kenai’s core architecture. You’ll design and scale microservices that power our workflow and logging engine, optimising for reliability and performance across thousands of enterprise sites. You’ll manage CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and cloud deployments while collaborating with product and integrations teams to deliver mission-critical features.

What You’ll Do

  • Architect and scale microservices for our workflow and logging engine.
  • Design and optimise DynamoDB data models for performance, cost-efficiency, and scale.
  • Own CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (SST on AWS) to ensure secure, automated deployments.
  • Build APIs and backend services that integrate with enterprise and third-party systems.
  • Collaborate with frontend engineers building in React and React Native to deliver seamless end-to-end experiences.
  • Monitor and optimise system reliability, latency, and throughput.
  • Mentor engineers and help raise engineering standards across the team.

Tech Stack

  • TypeScript across frontend and backend
  • React + React Native
  • AWS (cloud-native deployment)
  • Infrastructure as Code (SST / CDK)
  • DynamoDB (primary datastore), with exposure to PostgreSQL or other relational DBs a plus
  • Microservices architecture (API-first)
  • CI/CD automation (GitHub Actions or similar)

Requirements

  • 5+ years backend/platform engineering experience.
  • Proven ability to scale SaaS platforms on AWS.
  • Hands-on expertise with DynamoDB and designing for distributed data at scale.
  • Strong grounding in microservices architecture and cloud-native best practices.
  • Experience with Infrastructure as Code (SST/CDK/Terraform).
  • Comfortable working in TypeScript across backend and frontend.
  • Strong communicator who can translate technical depth into practical delivery.

Nice to Have

  • Experience with access control, IoT, or enterprise hardware integrations.
  • Familiarity with SOC2, GDPR, POPIA, or enterprise compliance.
  • Scale-up/startup SaaS experience.

Why Join Kenai?

  • Solve real engineering challenges at the intersection of cloud, data, and enterprise security.
  • Work with a small, senior team where your decisions shape the platform’s core.
  • Competitive salary + benefits + stock option pathway.
  • Hybrid flexibility in Cape Town or Johannesburg.