M-Pesa Africa Senior Infrastructure Architect at Safaricom Kenya

Key Responsibilities:
Infrastructure Architecture & Planning

• Define and maintain the target-state infrastructure architecture across data centres, cloud platforms, and edge environments;
• Lead the roadmap for infrastructure modernization including virtualization, hyperconverged systems, containerization, and network overlays;
• Establish infrastructure patterns and blueprints for compute, storage, backup, disaster recovery (DR), and network architectures;
• Align infrastructure strategy with enterprise architecture principles, performance objectives, and service-level agreements (SLAs).

Cloud and Hybrid Enablement

• Drive hybrid and multi-cloud architecture strategy across AWS, Azure, and private cloud (e.g. OpenStack, VMware);
• Architect secure, compliant infrastructure-as-code pipelines, integrating Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools;
• Guide cloud landing zone design, VPC architecture, identity federation, and interconnect strategies;
• Ensure observability, cost governance, and elasticity in cloud-native workloads.

Security, Resilience & Compliance

• Embed security-by-design principles into infrastructure blueprints, including microsegmentation, encryption, and zero-trust access;
• Architect HA/DR solutions across critical systems, ensuring geographic redundancy and failover readiness;
• Ensure infrastructure compliance with PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and local regulatory requirements;
• Support infrastructure risk assessments and penetration testing preparation.

Governance & Collaboration

• Participate in Architecture Review Boards to assess infrastructure impact and conformance to strategy;
• Collaborate with DevOps, SRE, security, and operations teams to promote infrastructure reliability and automation;
• Engage with vendors, cloud providers, and technology partners for capability assessment and solutioning;
• Produce and maintain infrastructure architecture documentation, standards, and runbooks.

Technical Experience & Qualifications

Essential Experience:

• 8+ years in infrastructure or cloud architecture roles within high-availability environments.
• Strong background in:
• Data center and cloud network architecture
• Compute and virtualization
• Storage and backup
• Hybrid cloud design
• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and automation
• CI/CD and infrastructure observability
• Platform engineering experience including service mesh and secure enclave deployment.
• Familiarity with Fintech or payments-grade infrastructure standards.
• Clear understanding of layered security models, zero trust architecture, and identity federation.

Demonstrated hands-on experience in:

• Architecting hybrid/multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Container orchestration using Kubernetes
• Designing and implementing IaaS and PaaS adoption models
• Strong understanding of compliance architecture for frameworks like PCI-DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001.

Proven experience integrating:

• Zero Trust Architecture principles
• Identity protocols (OAuth2, OpenID, SAML)
• Enterprise-level encryption solutions