M-Pesa Africa – Technical Operations Manager at Safaricom Kenya

Role Purpose

M-Pesa is a pioneering Fintech business and global market leader in mobile money. Starting from 2007 as a convenient means by which the unbanked and underbanked could make digital payments. M-Pesa has now grown to offer over 50 million active customers Financial Services, Enterprise, Merchant and Retail solutions. We are proud of our work in enabling the digital economy in our markets, and in driving Financial Inclusion.

M-Pesa Africa is now making strides to deepen and strengthen its offering to consumers and businesses in our operating countries, making it easier for them to manage their money and get more from their resources.

In this role you will be expected to lead and manage the 24x7x365 Technical enterprise and Network Operations Center as well as manage and own key people, processes and tools, to ensure robust systems monitoring and effective management of critical incidents to ensure overall availability, performance, health, and security of all services.

Key Role Responsibilities

• Responsible for managing and coordinating the Operations technical support teams. The main aim for this coordination is to ensure that the operations centre runs efficiently without interruption.
• Primarily deals with users, customers, vendors, engineers and the whole technical team.
• Ensures that the systems and technology used are constantly upgraded to remain relevant.
• Constantly update his / her knowledge as the success of a Technical manager depends on his / her knowledge of the industry and the level of experience in the field.
• The Technical Operations manager must keep senior management informed about major incidents which impact business.
• Comes up with innovative solutions to various networking problems and ensures that customer needs are properly defined and satisfactorily met. Constantly evaluates the workings of Operations centre and stays abreast of new technologies emerging in the industry.
• Technical Operations Manager oversees the work of junior employees to ensure that system requirements have been properly implemented and procedures carefully followed. Ensure that escalations procedures are clearly documented and understood.
• Responsible for informing Management, partners and peers about infrastructure performance issues and service availability.
• Ensures the duty shift table for the SSOC and the allocation of staff members (SSOC technicians and engineers) on different shift duties for ensuring the whole SSOC shift works in an efficient and effective manner.
• Ensure alignment with CAB/ECAB process to manage infrastructure downtime for maintenance or upgrades.
• Responsibility for direct supervision of team members;-
• Conduct Performance Appraisals, coaching, training and objective settings.
• Provide an assessment of all staff and provide internal/external training schedule
• Provide direction and leadership to build process-focused, cross-functional team.
• Manage scheduling of shift coverage and operational work streams to optimize service delivery.
• Address technical and non-technical escalations.
• Report on key metrics of availability, incident resolution and service delivery performance.  Manage and document Standards, Policies, and Processes for the Operations service based on Best practices.
• Perform regular process improvement reviews to ensure ongoing optimization. Incident and Event Management.
• Responsible for ensuring efficient resolution of incidents through people, process and technology.

Incident and Event Management

• Responsible for ensuring efficient resolution of incidents through people, process and technology.
• Ensure correct categorization of calls to reduce SLA breaches and downtime
• Provide timely, accurate, and effective communication on service impacting events.
• Work with vendors on issue resolution and communications

Enterprise Monitoring

• Responsible for the process to effectively monitor all services that ensures compliance with Tier model and SLAs
• Responsible for toolsets required to provide event management services
• Ensure maximum exploitation toolsets within Vodacom catalogue for monitoring

Ad-Hoc Project Management

• Manage projects to upgrade and maintain NOC technologies (SolarWinds, Splunk, etc).
• Assist with various service-related projects as requested.

QUALIFICATIONS
 
Apply if you have:

Essential

• Bachelor’s Degree in related field-Preferably STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
• Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience or equivalent combination of education and work experience leading Technical Operations Teams.
• 5+ years team or project management experience.
• Experience with monitoring technologies including Splunk, SolarWinds, Cisco APP Dynamics, Dynatrace, etc.
• Monitoring or troubleshooting experience for business-critical and revenue-generating platforms.
• Experience with system administration and troubleshooting of Linux, Unix and Windows.
• Experience implementing and maintaining monitoring policies and best practices.
• Experience in Java and UNIX shell or MS Powershell scripts.
• Understanding of Infrastructure environments – Datacentre, VMware, storage, networks, databases, etc
• Understanding of security issues in a FinTech and mobile network environment and awareness of potential vulnerabilities.
• Demonstrated ability of industry standard process frameworks (ITIL / Six Sigma).

Desirable

• Mobile Payment or Financial Services Experience
• Service Operations Qualification – ITIL
• Regulated industry experience