Principal IT Engineer
First seen by Alion on Nov 3, 2026.
Location: Cape Town | Work Type: Hybrid | Job ID: J107290
About our client:
Our client is a highly successful and purpose-driven group with a global shared services hub based in Cape Town. They are far more than a travel company; they act as a vital platform connecting world-class hospitality with large-scale environmental impact across Africa's most iconic wilderness areas. The organization prides itself on a culture of continuous improvement and ethical behaviour, where the mission is to ensure that natural ecosystems and local communities thrive together. You will join a collaborative, friendly team that avoids rigid hierarchies and values individual contribution. While they "think big" and move fast to protect vulnerable landscapes, they are deeply employee-centric, offering unusually generous benefits and a genuine commitment to work/life balance. This is an opportunity to bring your expertise to a stable yet growing organization where profit meets a profound sense of purpose. They are looking for adaptable, long-term partners who are ready to help drive positive change at scale.
What you will be doing:
- Establish and maintain enterprise infrastructure architecture, standards, and growth roadmaps.
- Review complex designs, manage technical debt, and provide senior technical direction and escalation.
- Lead, mentor, and develop globally distributed engineering teams while fostering a collaborative culture.
- Oversee the integration of new business sites into standardised Group environments and practices.
- Act as senior technical lead during major infrastructure and cybersecurity incidents, directing containment, investigation, and recovery.
- Manage architecture oversight across Azure, Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Active Directory, and hybrid Microsoft environments.
- Define enterprise network and firewall standards, including segmentation, VPN, SD-WAN, and ZTNA.
- Lead technical security architecture across EDR/XDR, identity security, privileged access, and ransomware resilience.
- Collaborate with MDR/SOC providers to enhance detection coverage, logging, and incident response capabilities.
- Prioritise and remediate vulnerabilities, security risks, and penetration-test findings using Zero Trust and defense-in-depth principles.
- Provide architecture oversight for enterprise backup platforms, disaster recovery, and regular restore testing.
- Set technical vulnerability, patch-management, and endpoint/RMM standards while guiding remediation of end-of-life infrastructure.
What our client is looking for:
- 10 years in enterprise infrastructure, networking, cloud, or cybersecurity, including 5 years in senior leadership or architecture.
- Proven track record of leading geographically distributed technical teams across multiple locations.
- Strong architectural experience with Azure, Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Active Directory, and Windows Server.
- Expertise in enterprise networking, secure remote access, segmentation, and firewall platforms like Fortinet.
- Background in EDR/XDR, security monitoring, vulnerability management, and cybersecurity incident response.
- Strong capabilities in technical documentation, architecture design, infrastructure automation, and scripting languages such as PowerShell.
- Deep knowledge of Conditional Access, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and privileged access management.
- Familiarity with routing, switching, VLANs, SD-WAN, ZTNA, MDR/SOC, and SIEM concepts.
- Experience with Windows Server, immutable backups, disaster recovery, ransomware recovery, and RMM standards.
- Grounded in Zero Trust, least privilege, defense in depth, CIS Controls, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, and ISO 27001 principles.
For a more comprehensive list of opportunities that we have on offer, do visit our website - https://www.parvana.co.uk/careers
Desired Experience & Qualification Infrastructure, Architecture, Azure, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Network, Active Directory, Zero Trust, Cloud, Fortinet, M365, PowerShell, DR, RMM, IT Leadership