(Re-advertisement) M-Pesa Africa - Senior Manager: Software Engineering at Safaricom Kenya

About the Role

This role will be key in driving the strategic evolution of the M-Pesa ecosystem by leveraging and optimizing existing platform capabilities, building new solutions and platforms to meet the future commercial requirements of M-Pesa, in the operating markets,  ensuring alignment with M-Pesa Africa’s global financial services footprint. This involves leveraging existing platforms and capabilities, key technology partners, maximizing cost efficiency, and delivering scalable, high-performance financial solutions that reinforce and improve M-Pesa Africa’s competitive advantage. This role ensures that M-Pesa Africa remains at the forefront of Mobile Payments innovation, fostering a robust financial ecosystem that drives sustained growth, market leadership, and expanded financial inclusion.

Responsibilities

• Strategic platform alignment and stakeholder engagement
  • Drive and Influence the Technology Strategy of MPA, supported by budgets and plans to deliver on the business strategy;
  • Drive close collaboration with the Commercial Teams to ensure solution development aligns seamlessly with market and functional roadmaps and priorities;
  • Engage with senior stakeholders, including Group SLTs and OpCo CEOs, ensuring transparency, strategic alignment, and informed decision-making throughout the platform development lifecycle;
  • Provide executive-level briefings on platform roadmaps, supplier strategies, and emerging opportunities in M-Pesa.
• Technology and Supplier Strategy
  • Proactively collaborate with strategic technology partners to analyze, influence, and accelerate the development of next-generation mobile payments capabilities;
  • Own and govern platform development initiatives, ensuring M-Pesa Africa retains final approval authority for all major architectural and engineering decisions.
• Enterprise architecture and platform engineering excellence
  • Collaborate with Mobile Payments, Enterprise Architecture & Design team, ensuring all design solutions adhere to best practices in scalability, security, and performance optimization;
  • Oversee software development governance, ensuring alignment with M-Pesa Africa’s global technology strategy and compliance frameworks.
• Quality Assurance and Operational Resilience
  • Direct collaboration with Assurance, Security, Testing Strategy, adhere to test automation framework, tooling ecosystem, and quality assurance methodology;
  • Partner with the Operations Team to ensure platforms deliver high availability, reliability, and service-level performance, meeting business-critical demands.
• Financial and Productivity Optimization
  • Work closely with Finance Teams to ensure efficient budget allocation, cost governance, and strategic investment in platform innovation;
  • Continuously seek opportunities for process optimization, driving enhancements in test automation, collaboration tools, and development productivity.

Qualifications:

• At least 10 years of deep expertise in Mobile Payments and Financial Services Architecture ie extensive knowledge of Distributed Payment Architectures, Real-Time Transaction Processing, Regulatory Compliance (e.g., PSD2, PCI-DSS), and mobile wallet ecosystems
• Enterprise-Grade Software Development Management leading full-lifecycle software development, including requirements engineering, CI/CD pipeline optimization, version control strategies (GitOps), and software configuration management. Experience in managing complex microservices-based, event-driven, and API-first architectures.
• Strategic business and customer-centric technical leadership – Strong focus on business impact, product-market fit, and end-user experience when driving technology decisions.
• Ability to deal with diverse cultures;
• International experience and multicultural sensitivity.

Education & Experience:

• A graduate degree preferably in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field;
• Professional certification in different delivery methodologies eg Agile, SAFe Agile or Waterfall;
• Proficiency in multiple programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, C++)
• Experience with designing and implementing complex software systems;
• Knowledge of DevOps practices and tools.