Jordan Levy | Head of DevOps

About

I'm a Head of DevOps based in Johannesburg, where I spend my time on cloud architecture, automation and modernising infrastructure that's overdue for it. I like building systems that keep working when nobody is watching them.

Most of my energy goes into closing the gap between development and operations, so teams can ship faster with less friction. I'm currently working through TOGAF to round out the enterprise architecture side.

Out of the office you'll find me running the streets of Johannesburg as co-captain of Pirates Road Running Club, working towards official marathons in every major South African city, as well as back to back Comrades marathons (my first being in June 2026) and a Washie 100 miler (committed for 2027).

Experience

July 2022 to Present

Head of DevOps, Exonic Solutions

I set the DevOps direction across our client projects, covering both the strategy and the hands-on delivery
Built fully automated CI/CD pipelines on AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild, with security scanning throughout and Dependency-Track watching our software supply chain
Brought Infrastructure as Code to the whole organisation with AWS CDK and SST, so environments come from code rather than a runbook
Distilled our well-architected AWS shapes (VPC, Aurora, Cognito, Lambda config) into a reusable IaC layer on SST that client projects now start from

July 2021 to July 2022

IT Operations Manager, Ascendis Consumer Brands

Owned IT end to end: services, systems, networks and the budget
Pulled the compute of five companies into one managed colocation facility
Ran the IT project portfolio and advised on digital and e-commerce strategy

June 2019 to June 2021

Group Systems Specialist, Ascendis Management Services

Rolled out group-wide mobile connectivity that cut mobile data spend by 40%
Negotiated IT equipment deals that saved over R1 million and turned CAPEX into OPEX
Wrote the group IT policies and saw them through to implementation

May 2016 to June 2019

Divisional IT Manager, Ascendis Pharma

Kept IT running for 250 users and managed the service providers behind it
Looked after the MRP and ERP systems and owned the IT budget
Untangled IT during the divestment and sale of a manufacturing site

September 2011 to May 2016

System Administrator to IT Manager, Akacia Healthcare

Owned IT for 400 users, covering services, maintenance and troubleshooting
Led the IT integration into Ascendis after the acquisition

Skills

Cloud: Lambda, ECS, EKS, EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, RDS / Aurora, DynamoDB, API Gateway, Cognito, EventBridge, Elastic Beanstalk, Well-Architected Framework, Azure (Web Apps, Container Apps, AKS), Cloudflare (Workers)
Infrastructure as Code: SST, AWS CDK (TypeScript), CloudFormation, Terraform (working knowledge)
CI/CD: AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines
Containers: Docker, Podman, Amazon ECS, EKS
Monitoring & Observability: Amazon CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana
Systems & Web: ALB, NGINX, Ansible, Linux administration (production, VMs and containers)
Data & Messaging: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Amazon SQS / SNS, RabbitMQ, BullMQ
Languages: Python, Bash, TypeScript, Swift
Security: CloudTrail, AWS WAF, Cloudflare (WAF), IAM Policy Design

Education and certifications

BSc Informatics

University of South Africa

Completed 2025 | 73.40% Average

TOGAF 10 Enterprise Architecture Foundation (in progress)