Latest Openings at Safaricom Kenya

We are pleased to announce the position of a Partner Management Officer in the Digital IT Department within the Technology Division.   In keeping with our current business needs, we are looking for a person who meets the criteria indicated below.

Reporting to the Digital Delivery Lead, the position holder will be responsible for initiating, facilitating, coordinating and maintaining the development of Strategic relationships and partnerships with our partners, vendors and other relevant stakeholders in order to meet our business objectives.

Job Responsibilities

• The role will continuously review sourcing strategies, engage and manage leading software house partners and contracts ensuring timely provision of skills on demand
• Develop and apply appropriate partnership risk assessment instruments to ensure the appropriate allocation of risk. Implement action plans to operationalize partnerships to advance contract activities and achieve planned results;
• Act as a liaison between the Partner and Internal Stakeholders and is responsible for building, maintaining and managing relationships with current and prospective partners.
• Evaluate effectiveness of partner programs and make recommendations to optimize them.
• Set clear and measurable objectives for the Partners which support the business strategy.
• On board all Enterprise partners and identify opportunities to grow and scale each partnership relationship to drive commercial success
• Forecast, measure, and report the results of various projects with partners, including co-created and/or co-branded content promotions, lead sharing, and/or event partnership
• Keep a great ongoing relationship with current partners and offer new ways to grow the partnership
• Collaborate with senior management and other marketing teammates to align our internal goals with new and existing partner relationships
• Developing and sustaining long-standing relationships with company-approved vendors.
• Implementing vendor selection programs to ensure that the best vendors are secured.
• Establishing standards by which to assess the performance of approved vendors.
• Evaluating current vendor management programs and identifying ways to improve them.
• Manage strategic vendor relationships to achieve goals of innovation, speed and efficiency.
• CAPEX & OPEX budgeting for the department
• Operate within approved CAPEX & OPEX expenditure for the domain to meet departmental objectives

Qualifications - External

• Bachelor’s degree in software engineering, IT or any other related field
• 2 or more years of experience in IT Delivery, preferably in managing large programs and partners.
• Deep expertise in budget planning and financial management in product-based organizations
• IT sourcing and vendor management, dealing with both large vendors and with niche market players (e.g. Start-ups)
• Experience in agile principles and processes within large engineering organizations
• Professional experience and knowledge of digital and Telecommunications industries strongly preferred

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Description

Reporting to the Big Data & CVM Lead, the position holder will design, build, deliver and/or optimize machine learning systems. This entails performing statistical analysis to resolve data problems and enhancing model accuracy and performance.

Responsibilities

• Design, architect and build solutions and tools for the big data platform
• Mediate and coordinates resolution of software project deliverables using agile methodology
• Develop pipelines to ingest data into the big data platform based on business demands and use cases
• Develop analytical platforms that will be used to avail data to end users for exploration, advanced analytics and visualizations for day-to-day business reporting
• Provide guidance and advise to technology teams on the best use of latest technologies and designs to deliver a best-in-class platform in the most cost-effective way
• Develop automated monitoring solutions to be handed over to support teams to run and operate the platform efficiently
• Automate and productionize data science models on the big data engineering platform

Qualifications

• BS or MS in computer science or equivalent practical experience
• At least 2-3 years of coding experience in a non-university setting.
• Experience in Object Oriented development
• Proficient understanding of distributed computing principles
• Experience in collecting, storing, processing and analyzing large volumes of data.
• Experience with building stream-processing systems, using solutions such as Storm or Spark-Streaming
• Experience with various messaging systems, such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
• Experience with NoSQL databases, such as HBase, Cassandra, MongoDB
• Understanding of big data technologies:  Cloudera/MapR/Hortonworks

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Description

Reporting to the Big Data & CVM Lead, the position holder will be responsible for development and support of CVM Platforms. Responsible for availability, performance, change management, security and capacity planning of CVM Platforms.

Responsibilities

• Providing operations level support including 2nd and 3rd level support for the CVM platforms.
• Building software to help operations and support teams. This entails proactively building and implementing services, including end to end monitoring, scripting and automation, modern tooling and maintenance software.
• Creating prototypes, designing and building modules and solutions in an iterative agile cycle, develop, maintain, and optimize the business outcome
• Estimating user and technical stories, designing and developing code, writing and executing unit and integration tests, and supporting testing of deliverables against user and technical story acceptance tests
• Performing peer reviews, collaborating with architects and other developers to produce “just enough” design, and ensuring that enough technical documentation and training is provided for reference and operational support
• Documenting “tribal” knowledge and constant upkeep of the playbooks and runbooks to ensure teams get the information they need right when they need it.
• Managing technical debt as part of daily activities
• Developing and executing automation scripts and maintenance jobs
• Conducting peer reviews and maintaining coding standards
• Managing incidents as level two and level three support
• Managing problems as level two and level three support
• Estimating user and technical stories to help inform and prioritize backlog
• Designing modules according to user stories, UX/UI designs, and technical stories
• Developing solutions according to module designs and deploy using delivery pipeline
• Developing and execute unit and integration tests; support testing against user and technical story acceptance tests
• Reviewing design and architecture to guarantee service availability, performance and resilience
• Resolution of Incidents, providing RCA and recommendations to improve SLA.
• Responsible for ensuring availability of CVM Platform.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in computer science or equivalent practical experience
• At least 2-3 years of coding experience.
• Experience in at least 1 programming language. Java, C#, Python, Spring Boot.
• Experience with SQL databases, such as Oracle, MySQL, Postgres.
• Knowledge of cloud technologies. AWS, GCP, Azure.

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Description

Reporting to the Enterprise Integration & BPM Support Lead, the position holder will be responsible for support, administration, service provisioning and availability of Enterprise Integration services, related automated business processes and order management framework.

This includes L2/L3 support and ensuring operational efficiency for all the services under the domain in accordance with ITIL, ISO and other agreed measures of excellence.

Responsibilities

• 2nd /3rd line technical Support: – Support defined domain areas by ensuring all related services and products are operationally optimal. This includes tasks assignment and KPI monitoring.
• Service availability and monitoring: – Monitor data and service availability for all Enterprise Integration services, business process automation tools & services and order management. This includes ensuring that the set KPIs are met.
• Incidents and problem management: – Provide expert management of Incidents, root cause analysis, management of problems and closure of recurring incidents related to the responsible domains. E.g., TIBCO services, SOA services, Order services and BPM. This should be within the defined ITIL, ISO and other acceptable guidelines
• Coordination and follow up: – Coordination within the team, at cross-functional level and suppliers to ensure synergy is achieved and timelines are met in all team objectives. This includes monitoring the supplier SLAs.
• Testing and Quality management: – Work hand in hand with the delivery teams to ensure services and products transitioned to production are of optimal quality. This includes non-functional quality elements e.g., capacity management, load test, security and other elements.
• Reporting: – Maintain reports on SLA, OLAs, Vendor performance, support trends and other relevant KPIs.
• Research and development: – Participate in research and development including adoption of new ways of managing operations e.g. Machine learning, proactive monitoring, CI/CD and other emerging technologies.

Leadership

• Participate in stakeholder engagement to ensure their services delivery needs are catered for. This will involve close working with the business engagement team.
• Participate in team mentorship to ensure optimal performance.
• Engage the various business units’ stakeholders to ensure continual service improvement incorporation as per provided feedback.
• Participate in service redesign and enhancement discussions.
• Research and development: - Take part in research and development including adoption of current ways of managing integration, development, and delivery. E.g., agile delivery, scrum methodologies, DevSecOps, and other emerging methodologies.

Support

• Working with planning and delivery teams to deliver enhancements as well as fix bugs for already deployed solutions as per ITIL & ISO guidelines.
• Support onboarding of all integration services to Dynatrace, Splunk and any other monitoring tool.
• Lead and support the adoption of Machine learning and AIOPs initiatives within the Integration space.

Qualifications

• University Degree in Computer Science or related technical field.
• Certification or training in database administration and application development. E.g. oracle, mysql, PL/SQL, or other no-sql databases.
• ITIL or ISO training and certification
• Training and advanced Experience in HTML5, Java, RSS, webserver technologies, scripting and MySQL.
• Certification or training in TIBCO technologies, Oracle SOA, TIBCO FOS (or any order management framework), Oracle or TIBCO BPM.
• Certification or training in architecture or business analysis is an added advantage.
• Red hat OpenShift/Kubernetes certification or training is an added advantage.
• 5 years’ experience in a networked and dynamic IT environment at least 3 of those should be as a senior software developer or architecture role.
• 5 years Software development with a bias in middleware and application server platforms skills like Tibco, Mule soft , oracle SOA, Jboss, WebLogic, WebSphere, Glassfish, Java ,Tomcat EE & scripting skills.
• Advanced skill in webserver administration and optimization. E.g. Apache, Apache Tomcat, Microsoft IIS or any other commercial.
• Knowledge and experience with No-SQL, Big Table/Columnar data systems, parallel data processing, Software as a Service added advantage
• Knowledge and experience with containerized environments (Redhat OpenShift, Kubernetes etc) desired.

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Reporting to the Engineering Lead – Service Availability, the position holder will be tasked with monitoring and improving the operational aspects of all systems in scope within DIT. Drive automation and Dev-ops across the different domains. Foster service monitoring through proactive initiatives like AIOPs, machine learning among other available channels.

Job 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.
• Developing and executing automation scripts and maintenance jobs.
• Onboarding DIT systems to the service monitoring tools (APMs).
• Clearly document any monitoring gaps noted and collaborate with the relevant teams to ensure timely closure.
• Performance of Applications error analysis and follow-up to ensure optimal customer experience.
• Deployment of planned & operational changes on systems in scope.
• Support all Digital squads to ensure new products are monitored.
• Support in Zero touch Operations initiatives.

Qualifications - External

• Bachelor’s Degree in either Computer Science or Information Technology, Electrical and communication engineering or Business Information Systems or in a relevant field in telecommunication.
• At least 2 years’ experience in a busy telco or IT setup.
• Domain knowledge in at least 3 of the following areas , Databases, Containerization, VAS, Integration, Virtualization, Cloud (AWS or Azure), Orchestration (Kubernetes), App development (Android / IOS)
• Good understanding of the micro service architecture & appreciation of the traditional/classic SOA
• Technical Knowledge of working on Dev-Ops
• Ability to manage a team having leadership skills, ownership of issues been analytical and a problem solver
• Being able to implement strict change management policy
• Good understanding of back-end programming such us Python, Java, NodeJS or Javascript.
• Knowledge on front end programming will be an added advantage.
• Formulate SLAs for each level of incident and therefore implement a service management approach for all types of services rendered.
• Be well versed with modern monitoring tools and systems with experience in APMs such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Splunk etc.
• Well versed with SRE concepts 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