Renier Kotze

Platform ownership for the Money Market division's cloud estate, in an environment where all AWS access is brokered through pipelines for security and audit reasons.

• Own a modular Terraform and Terragrunt codebase provisioning infrastructure across eight AWS accounts spanning the full SDLC, structured as reusable modules within a dependency DAG so environments stay consistent and new services onboard without bespoke configuration.
• Operate the Amazon EKS platform hosting production microservices — cluster access control, IAM role mapping, namespace lifecycle, workload identity, add-on management and platform upgrades.
• Leading an in-progress authentication modernisation: aws-auth ConfigMap to EKS Access Entries, and IRSA to EKS Pod Identity, run as a phased coexistence cutover (API_AND_CONFIG_MAP) to unblock cluster version upgrades without interrupting running services.
• Built and maintain the Azure DevOps pipelines that are the only sanctioned route to AWS, producing a fully auditable, credential-free deployment trail.
• Wrote a Python EKS health-check tool against the Kubernetes API, invoked from pipelines with exit-code gating and DR-region awareness, so cluster degradation blocks a release rather than being discovered after one.
• Extended the Terragrunt DAG with an API Gateway module fronting private EKS services — REST API with proxy integration, API-key authentication, usage plans and a VPC Link to an internal NLB — and resolved a production VPC Link failure traced to incorrect NLB selection in Terraform data sources.
• Run production observability on Datadog, with Prometheus and an EFK stack across non-production, and alerting through OpsGenie, Mattermost and Microsoft Teams.
• Built DR-aware deployment automation with primary and secondary region switching, validated through extensive testing and a regional failover rehearsal.
• Deployed a self-hosted LLM platform for documentation review and deployment-process improvement: Dify on EKS, Ollama and Qdrant on EC2, PostgreSQL on RDS.

• Designed and built the complete DevOps environment and CI/CD pipeline for the Old Mutual Will product from a standing start, delivering a turnkey deployment capability rather than a collection of scripts.
• Built the initial platform on Docker Swarm, Jenkins and EC2-based load balancing, including the automation and deployment tooling around it.
• Migrated the environment to GitLab CI and Amazon ECS as the product matured, integrating with the EC2 services that remained in place.
• Continue to provide DevOps ownership and support for the environment.

• Implemented and administered the automation toolchain — Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, Bitbucket and Git — within the DevOps team.
• Led adoption of DevOps practice across the organisation, working with delivery teams on how change reached production.
• Planned and tracked infrastructure work through the Atlassian suite, and authored the technical documentation the team worked from.

• Managed day-to-day Premium Support operations for the Graduate and Security Cloud Support Engineer teams.
• Delivered training and continuous technical coaching, and managed individual performance and development.
• Established quality management systems including standard operating procedures and lean programmes, and defined quality metrics and KPIs jointly with department heads and global teams.

• Second-line escalation engineer for enterprise AWS customers, resolving production failures across EC2, VPC, Linux, CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, Docker, Amazon ECS, CodePipeline, Lambda and Python — the cases that had already defeated first-line support.
• Managed customer escalations during major service events and critical incidents.
• Advised enterprise customers on streamlining deployment and automation, and built internal tooling to improve Premium Support processes.
• Recruited, coached and trained support engineers, and ran technical training sessions and workshops.