M-Pesa Africa - Application Operations Specialist at Safaricom Kenya

About the Role

Reporting to the Technical Operations Manager, you will be responsible for ensuring the delivery of assigned M-Pesa services to end-customers and/or Local Market Business Teams. You will act as the first escalation point towards service vendors / L2 support teams and Local Market IT teams supporting relevant infrastructure and/or connecting services. You will also work with all the internal and external partners in the support chain to ensure agreed service levels and adherence to the agreed support processes. 

Responsibilities

• Lead the deployment, configuration, and maintenance of software applications critical to the organization's operations.
• Identify monitoring requirements to track application performance and health, proactively identifying and addressing issues to minimize downtime.
• Identify and implement best practice and process improvements with 3rd parties delivering application operation services.
• Coordinate with cross-functional teams to troubleshoot and resolve application-related incidents, ensuring prompt restoration of services.
• Support system audits for markets and services assigned.
• Work closely with cybersecurity teams to ensure applications comply with security standards and regulations.
• Develop and maintain disaster recovery plans to ensure business continuity in the event of system failures or disasters.
• Coordinating capacity planning to forecast future resource requirements and scale applications accordingly.
• Identify continuous improvement initiatives to enhance the reliability, performance, and efficiency of applications through process improvements and technology upgrades.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation for applications, including configuration details and troubleshooting guides (SOP).
• Provide training and support to internal teams on application usage and support procedures.
• Lead a team of operations engineers or technicians, providing guidance, coaching, and mentorship to foster a high-performance culture.
• Manage incident resolution time within SLA target.
• Responsible to ensure technical service level compliance for services operated by Product Operations or by 3rd parties on behalf of service owner
• Responsible for managing incidents, including implementation of workarounds and changes, and for executing service requests, including on call duties.

Qualifications

• At least 5 years of experience in Managed Operations for large scale IT Applications and Services in a multinational environment
• At least 5 years of experience in managing 3rd parties and solution vendors to ensure services are delivered according to agreed SLAs
• Strong knowledge of operations management of high complex IT/financial  services
• Deep understanding of operational procedures and process standards (e.g. ITIL) and the ability to apply and evaluate them for continuous improvements in the service operations area.
• Experience and background in a complex business environment and working in multicultural teams with a strong focus on supplier management
• Ability to understand and evaluate:
• Web and mobile service technologies:
  • Operating systems (e.g. Linux, Windows)
  • Databases (e.g. oracle, mongo DB, postgres)
  • Cloud solutions
• Strong ability to understand goals which are cascaded through a hierarchy and work towards their prioritization and accomplishment in the department
• Strong ability
  • To manage in dynamic, high-growth, high-uncertainty environments
  • To balance conflicting interest
  • To take decisions