Careers at Safaricom Kenya

Job Description

• Reporting to the DevSecOps Practise Area Lead, the DevSecOps Engineer will build secure, automated, and intelligent digital platforms. The role blends backend engineering (Go, Java) with DevSecOps practices, automated security, and AIOps observability, while also focusing on automating developer workflows to improve speed, security, and productivity. This role directly impacts core Safaricom platforms, including M-Pesa, enterprise APIs, and cloud-native services, ensuring speed, scale, and security.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop secure, high-performance APIs and microservices.
• Containerize services and optimize for reliability at scale.
• Build automated unit, integration, and load testing frameworks.
• Embed SAST, DAST, SCA scans into Jenkins pipelines.
• Automate image scanning, dependency checks, and SBOM generation.
• Apply Zero Trust & policy enforcement (OPA, Kyverno) across Kubernetes and cloud workloads.
• Maintain secure secrets management (Vault/KMS).
• Use AI/ML-driven monitoring for anomaly detection and predictive incident management.
• Automate incident response with self-healing runbooks.
• Track reliability KPIs (MTTD, MTTR, SLA uptime).
• Design Jenkins pipelines that go beyond deployment by automating developer tasks (builds, security scans, test triggers, code quality gates).
• Improve developer productivity with automation of repetitive tasks (e.g., branch policy checks, PR validations, dependency updates).
• Promote a developer self-service model through DevSecOps tooling.

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Cybersecurity.
• 3–7 years of experience in backend, DevOps, or security roles.
• Proficiency in Go and Java backend development.
• Advanced knowledge of Jenkins CI/CD and GitOps workflows.
• Hands-on with Kubernetes, Docker, and container security.
• Strong grasp of IaC (Terraform, Crossplane, Ansible).
• Familiarity with AIOps/observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, ELK, Grafana).
• Experience with automating developer workflows (branch policies, build pipelines, workflow scripts).
• Analytical and problem-solving mindset.
• Strong collaboration across Dev, Sec, Ops, and business units.
• Passion for automation-first culture.
• Added advantage: certifications like CKS, AWS Security, DevSecOps Foundation, or contributions to open-source DevSecOps tools.

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Job Description

The position holder will be the liaison between business system users and the technical team in as far as building automated business solutions is concerned. The role holder will also be responsible for gathering, detailing, and documenting business requirements into solution designs for business users and technical developers. Propose ways in which the existing processes and systems can be used or changed to meet new business requirements as well as identify internal systems integrations needed to meet business requirements. They must have significant business knowledge and have one or more areas of technical expertise in software development, solution architecture and/or enterprise architecture. They are viewed as a solution expert and provide knowledge/counsel to software engineers.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

• Carry out full business requirements discovery that includes interviewing relevant stakeholders and end users i.e., requirements elicitation.
• Collect, classify, analyze, and document business requirements as per set standards.
• Ensure sensible consensus is reached for all requirements/specifications and help business, IT, and test leads to have the same mutual understanding thereof.
• Create detailed solution designs to meet business requirements by exploiting the functionality available in IT systems already in Safaricom, or by filling missing gaps with appropriate new systems, in accordance with enterprise architecture.
• Lead a project team composed of designers and developers to drive the business needs and expectations by ensuring business intent is understood and delivered by IT.
• Ensure best practices are adhered to such as reusability, monitoring, performance, security etc.
• Collaboratively oversee the development of solutions as per agreed architecture, evolving them throughout the delivery in the face of changing requirements and feedback from the team.
• Collaboratively develop test-driven business requirements and functional specifications with business, technical, and testing team members.
• Participate in technical/functional evaluation of bids for new systems.
• Liaise with other sections/departments in the delivery of services and projects as well as maintain good working relations between the Squad & Tribe team and all stakeholders.
• Provide support to the Business Unit by assisting in the development/reviewing/translating of User Requirement Specifications into a baseline BRD (Business Requirements Document) and building design documents.
• Promote proper release planning, guaranteeing adherence to business needs, change management governance and priorities.
• Follow a prioritization process that is transparent and understandable for all parties involved.
• Participate in innovation to improve delivered products and services and to explore new technologies and their applications to the enterprise space.                     

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, IT, or related fields. 
• Desirable: at least 4 years’ professional experience, in fields such as software development, solution architecture, cloud architecture or related fields.
• A “hands-on software architect” capable of sharing software development experience with the rest of the team, which in turn helps them better understand how the architecture is viewed from a development perspective.
• Expert-level development in at least 1 language such as Java, Python, NodeJs, GO or .NET.
• Mastery of at least one Web Framework and for their language of choice
• Deep knowledge and use of fundamental database concepts
• Ability to run user requirement workshops and capture complex business requirements across multiple domains.
• Strong business acumen and leadership mindset with ability to communicate and influence others.
• Has analytical skills to picture an end-to-end solution derived from a design document
• Ability to drive initiatives without any formal authority in an ambiguous environment
• Exposure to multiple, diverse technologies and processing environment
• Certification in TOGAF and/or Public Clouds will be an added advantage.
• Prior experience in Agile ways of working will be an added advantage

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Key Responsibilities:

• Proactively building and implementing monitoring services, including end to end monitoring, scripting and automation, modern tooling and maintenance software. 
• Use of AI and Machine learning to perform log analysis and create predictive models that will assist in identifying potential failures. 
• Design, develop and support Inhouse Observability platform. 
• Design and maintain scalable, high-availability observability pipelines and dashboards for microservices and cloud infrastructure.
• Define and enforce SLO/SLI/ SLA/ Error budgets standards, set actionable alerts, and drive continuous reliability improvements.
• Partner with SRE, DevOps, Development Squads and security teams to instrument services using OpenTelemetry and related tooling.
• Build custom Agents, exporters, collectors or integrations where off-the-shelf solutions fall short.

Job Requirements:

• Bachelor’s Degree in either Computer Science, Software Engineering, Business Information Technology, or any other relevant field.
• Domain knowledge in Sysadmin especially Linux, Linux Kernel.
• Strong skills in Go, Rust and a scripting language like Python or Bash for building custom exporters, scripts and integrations.
• Technical understanding of SRE Practices with respect to providing stable services to customers and adhering to availability KPIs, Service Level Objectives, Service Level Indicators & conforming to target monthly error budget. 
• Proven experience with multiple observability platforms (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/Elastic, Dynatrace, etc.).
• Deep knowledge of manual and auto-instrumentation using OpenTelemetry SDK and Collector.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes especially Openshift distro.
• Proficiency with Ansible/ Rundeck/ Helm and integration of observability into build and deployment pipelines.
• Conversant with both ITIL & Agile ways of working.