M-Pesa - Support Engineer-Financial Solutions at Safaricom Kenya

We are pleased to announce the subject career opportunity within Technology (M-Pesa) reporting to the Manager, Financial Solutions.

About M-Pesa

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 can make digital payments, M-Pesa has now grown to offer >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 is currently supporting 6 markets and scaling with a mission to build a ONE M-Pesa, the largest FinTech and digital ecosystem in Africa by 2025.

Our Culture Pillars: Customer Focused; Innovation; Experiment & Be bold; Teamwork

Role Description

The position holder will be responsible for improving existing solutions, providing technical support, troubleshooting and monitoring financial solutions applications to ensure 99.999% availability of the system.

Technical support duties include but not limited to architecture reviews and optimization, incident handling, detailed root cause analysis, problem management, configuration management, automation of routine tasks, documentation and operational acceptance compliance.

What you will be doing

• Ensure data and/or application availability of the assigned systems and applications;
• Participate in design, testing and implementation of new products, services, functionalities or upgrades
• Provide support for financial solutions which includes MPESA and integrations
• Perform Systems and Applications Monitoring
• Maintain knowledge base by documenting technical knowledge
• Collaborate with team members to improve the tools, systems and procedures
• Participate and provide input to the M-PESA roadmap to ensure timely delivery of relevant products to Safaricom Customers;
• Work with the external and internal technical teams to ensure efficient resolution of all system issues
• Implement DevOps technologies and processes, e.g.: containerization
• Liaise with all stakeholders to ensure new functionality, processes and systems are fully understood
• Transfer system knowledge to internal customers on new features and support processes
• Prepare and publish accurate and timely system performance reports
• Perform regular service improvements that align with 99.999% availability
• Diagnose and troubleshoot technical issues on the assigned systems and apply a work around or a permanent solution to resolve ensuring the MTTR is met
• Properly escalate unresolved issues to appropriate internal or external teams and follow up to ensure they are satisfactorily closed
• Provide prompt and accurate feedback to stakeholders on assigned tasks
• Ensure all issues are logged in the service management tool and are properly prioritized and accurately log resolution details in the ticket

Competencies you require for the role

Working With Others

• Consciously takes steps to make the most of every conversation/interaction
• Identifies people’s needs, interests, and motives to be able to influence the decisions they make
• Communicates simply to excite and engage people
• Pro-actively adapts own style and approach to build rapport, and work with others more effectively
• Builds and maintains strong relationships and networks

Operational Excellence

• Targets effort and resources on high-value, high impact activity  
• Focuses on achieving maximum performance and driving continuous improvement
• Thinks about processes and problems cross-functionally and end-to-end
• Uses knowledge of products, technology, process, systems, and policy to solve problems

Creativity and Innovation

• Finds creative ways to exploit opportunities and solve problems
• Takes risks and pushes what is possible
• Experiments with unorthodox approaches

Business Know-how

• Uses data and research to make decisions that are competitively and financially robust
• Balances current and future needs
• Thinks and acts like an owner of the business 
• Acts in line with legal, regulatory, professional, and ethical standards

Working With Change

• Responds flexibly to changing situations
• Manages the business and people aspects of change to drive performance

Project and Programme Management

• Defines scope and deliverables in terms of time, cost, quality, and business benefit 
• Schedules activity and identifies resource needs, dependencies, and synergies  
• Evaluates progress, mitigates risks, and addresses issues

QUALIFICATIONS

Apply if you have:

• A bachelor’s degree in information technology, Computer Science, Engineering or relevant field as a minimum
• 2 years of work experience as an engineer in a telecommunications or financial services environment
• Expertise in system monitoring and alerting strategies and can draw on their experience to drive improvements in system monitoring with automation, third party tools and frameworks
• Working knowledge of databases and SQL
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills
• Software development skills in Java, python, Angular JS etc
• Knowledge in ITIL Service Operations processes and Agile methodology. Certification in Scrum fundamentals is an added advantage.
• Working knowledge in dev ops and dev ops tools like Github
• Knowledge in mobile money systems, integrations or Financial systems
• Must be able to work without supervision & meet tight deadlines/schedules
• Good presentation skills
• Proactive & self-motivated

What you can expect from us:

• We believe in a fair and robust interview process
• We have a robust flexible total reward scheme
• Dedicated support and mentoring/coaching
• Opportunity to develop and progress – plus a solid dedication to work-life integration. It all means you’ll have everything you need to advance your career and achieve your full potential.