Job Description

.We are Africa's largest fintech providing financial services to more than 60 million customers and 5 million businesses, with transactions of over $1.2 billion a day across 8 countries.Driven by a strong passion in innovation, we provide Africa's leading super app, the M-PESA Super App, pioneering a digital financial ecosystem that empowers customers and businesses to send and receive money and payments across the world, enables them with access to affordable credit and savings propositions, and provides them with best-in-class solutions to easily grow their wealth and businesses.United in our purpose to Transform Lives, we are determined and energetic in exploring and delivering solutions that consistently address our customers' needs as we believe that we can only succeed if our customers and the community around us are succeeding.Are you driven, passionate and enthusiastic about working on innovations that transform more than 60 million lives across the continent? Join us today!Role Purpose:

• The Platform Engineering Manager is responsible for the end-to-end health of the shared infrastructure and platform built to power M-Pesa products and services. Working collaboratively with technology teams, the Platform Engineering Manager will help to drive operations and automation to accelerate product delivery and ensure consistent and stable services. They will ensure that the technologies employed across environments including Security and DevOps are correctly operated through a mixture of in-house and third-party teams and services, to provide a resilient, secure, and highly available platform for our products and services to run on, and that the overall strategy for platform delivery is defined, approved, and implemented.
• You will be required to establish, deliver, and refine a platform engineering roadmap to ensure that all platforms and products remain current, deliver value to product engineering teams, and supports the needs of internal stakeholders in terms of scalability, resilience, security, capacity, and operational maintenance.
• You will be responsible to implement and maintain shared platform services in a fast, secure, and efficient way to build NextGEN Technology platforms. Drive the roadmap of the Platform Engineering and supports the delivery of key futures by other business ART's.
• Implementing cloud-native infrastructure, enabling microservices and extensive use of Open APIs, as well as achieving zero service outage, which requires enabling CI/CD tools and DevSecOps.

Your responsibilities will include:Help align Strategy with execution:

• Provide input into the Platform strategy.
• Delivery of the Strategic Platform Engineering RoadMap
• Designing and implementing solutions which have high availability and are scalable.
• Build business cases for different Platform Engineering propositions
• Interface between Product squads and Cloud Infrastructure teams.

Drive Platform engineering (DevOps) Maturity:

• Creating and implement a DevOps SRE strategy, involving the creation of roadmap, introduction of processes, metrics, and systems to ensure success of the function.
• Manage and optimize the flow of value through the ART through ongoing evaluation of practices associated with DevSecOps and Release on Demand in the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
• Drive an engineering culture of continuous improvement (CI) based on data, e.g. Platform Performance metrics.
• Ensure technical debt and associated impacts are visible to stakeholders
• Ensure RISKs are managed, to remove impediments and ensuring mitigations are implemented.
• Build and maintain a core set of metrics that allow the business to understand the state of the infrastructure and platform performance.

.Platform Engineering business as usual:

• Manage the delivery of features requested by the ARTS during PI planning.
• Manage product backlog for Platform engineering team
• Ensure that operational SLA and KPI's are met by DevOps team.
• Help to transform the M-pesa HUB into a cloud native environment.
• Migrate all cloud-based Dev, Test and UAT and OAT environments to the Private cloud on the HUB to implement cost savings.
• Manage yearly capacity upgrades.
• Manage capacity planning for all platforms and infrastructure.
• Ensure SLA's are met for vulnerability and patch management on Infrastructure across M-PESA
• Drive automation of patch management across all platforms
• Implement CI/Cd toolset and pipelines on the HUB and other platforms.
• Implement Infrastructure and code to automate the spin up virtual environments.
• Approve user access to the platforms and environment under Platform Engineering's control.
• Line manager to allocated people in Platform Engineering
• Facilitate and guide platform engineering discussions in weekly architectural forum.
• Manage infrastructure asset register for M-Pesa Platform Engineering
• Responsible for Incident and Problem management for L2 support on the HUB.
• Responsible for the delivery of network connectivity between the markets, HUB and AWS.
• Perform monthly User and ARM group attestation for the M-Pesa HUB
• Implement processes and controls within platform Engineering to improve and maintain the CSB Score to 4.0 or higher.
• Maintain platform availability of 99.99% across all platforms.
• Responsible for Infrastructure support and monitoring on AWS non-production systems
• Delivery of AWS hosted systems for non-production and production environments through the development of Terraform code, based on requirements provided by the release trains.
• Responsible for PAM (Privilege access management) on the M-Pesa HUB.

.Prepare and Facilitate PI Planning:

• Facilitate PI Planning readiness by fostering the Continuous Exploration process
• Assist with economic decision-making by facilitating feature and capability estimation by teams and the roll-up to Epics, where necessary
• Prepare for and facilitate PI Planning event
• Summarize Team PI Objectives into Program PI Objectives
• Resource management and recruitment associated with ART including 3rd party resources

Guide Program Execution:

• Track the delivery of features
• Help manage risks and dependencies
• Escalate and track impediments
• Facilitate periodic synchronization events, including the ART sync, Systems Demos and Inspect and Adapt workshops
• Ensure effective vendor management
• Provide regular reporting and analysis to drive effective decision making and continuous improvement

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• Bachelor's Degree: A bachelor's degree in business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is essential.
• Master's Degree: An MBA or a master's degree in a related field is advantageous.
• You must have experience with Infrastructure as Code, Scripting / Automation, Tooling pipelines: Terraform, GoCD, GitHub, Nexus, etc.
• A strong understanding of AWS and Azure (and other cloud services) and its surrounding services.
• Expertise in cloud technical architectures and deployment models (serverless vs server managed).
• Experience of implementing and improving infrastructure monitoring and engineering metrics.
• Management Experience in a FinTech environment, or at least infrastructure in a financial service environment - minimum 2 years
• Technical experience working with infrastructure technologies - Min 5 years
• Has background in IT Execution, with hands-on experience in Platform engineering and infrastructure, and with CI/CD, who understands modern architecture patterns, the digital technology space, and is capable of simplifying and decoupling legacy systems. Also familiar with information security vulnerabilities and risk management.
• working with PaaS, API Microservices driven environments.
• Strong experience managing complex build and run PaaS environments.
• Good understanding of DevOps or DevSecOps.
• Proven experience in the following technologies: server, network and firewall Hardware; Infrastructure Virtualization; Data Centers; VMware; Cloud infrastructure

Personal Attributes

• Self-starter
• Ability to work under pressure and without supervision
• Servant leader
• Excel at analytical thinking
• Excel in Critical Thinking
• An adaptive, empathetic, collaborative, and positive mindset

Closing date for Applications: 11 February 2025.The base location for this role is, Vodacom Midrand Campus.The Company's approved Employment Equity Plan and Targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. As an Equal Opportunities employer, we actively encourage and welcome people with various disabilities to apply.
Vodacom is committed to an organisational culture that recognises, appreciates and values diversity & inclusion.Commitment from VodacomVodacom is committed to attracting, developing and retaining the very best people by offering a flexible, motivating and inclusive workplace in which talent is truly recognized, developed and rewarded. We believe that diversity plays an important role in the success of our business and we are committed to creating an inclusive work environment which respects, values, celebrates and makes the most of peoples individual differences - we are not only multinational but multicultural too. At Vodacom you will have access to our excellent flexible benefits programme that you would expect from any global company.

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