Vacancies at Equity Bank Kenya

THE ROLE PURPOSE

• The Operations & Maintenance Team Lead is accountable for the stability, availability and security of the core platform and all it’s integrations. This role combines strategic leadership with hands-on technical expertise, owning the OPEX budget, driving the 1-5-10 operational mandate and building a Center of Excellence that standardizes operational practices across the region.
• Working closely with delivery teams, vendors and integration partners, the Senior Manager ensures operational readiness for all production deployments, leads transformation from reactive to automated code-driven operations and balances change velocity with platform stability in a high-demand environment. The key driver for this role is to achieve world-class operational excellence through strategic direction-setting, building organizational capability and maintaining ultimate accountability for service delivery across technical operations staff managing multiple systems in the domain and across the region.

the KEY responsibilities 

Strategic Operations & Reliability Excellence

High-Velocity Incident Management (The 1-5-10 Mandate)

• Establish strategic vision and framework for achieving "1-5-10" operational mandate across all DFS Technical Operations teams as a core KPI with implementation targets by Q4 2026
• Define success metrics, monitoring frameworks and reporting mechanisms; ensure managers execute comprehensive strategies for rapid detection (1 minute), investigation (5 minutes) and remediation (10 minutes)
• Provide hands-on technical leadership during critical incidents with significant business impact or complexity requiring senior-level coordination

SRE & Automation Transformation

• Drive strategic transformation from reactive, manual operations to proactive, automated, code-driven practices across the core platform and integrations
• Champion investment in self-healing infrastructure and intelligent automation; set technical direction for automation priorities balancing quick wins with long-term goals
• Allocate OPEX budget strategically; personally assess and approve high-impact automation solutions before production deployment
• Platform Stability & Availability Leadership
• Own ultimate accountability for world-class availability, performance and security of the core platform and integrations across a regional footprint
• Balance change velocity with operational stability; establish platform-wide observability standards and step into critical technical decisions during major incidents

SERVICE MANAGEMENT & GOVERNANCE

Service Lifecycle Strategy & Oversight

• Define strategic approach to Service Management across Incident, Problem, Change and technical debt elimination; establish platform-wide SLA/OLA frameworks
• Review major incident trends driving strategic interventions; set standard for blameless post-mortem culture and approve changes to service management processes

Operational & Production Deployment Readiness

• Own strategic framework for operational readiness; establish and evolve operational acceptance criteria, certification standards and production/go-live processes
• Provide final approval for high-risk deployments; enforce pre-production validation standards and drive accountability with delivery teams for operability

Change Advisory & Enterprise Risk Management

• Provide senior advisory input and final approval for all changes; assess enterprise-level change risk particularly for cross-platform impacts
• Coordinate change planning with peer Senior Managers (Configurations, Delivery) to prevent conflicts; set change policies and approve change windows
• Review and approve root cause analysis for failed changes and major change-related incidents

Stakeholder Engagement

• Conduct regular briefings on platform health, risk landscape and operational performance; consolidate technical feedback highlighting risks, opportunities and strategic recommendations
• Represent Technical Operations in executive forums; manage stakeholder expectations during major incidents; build relationships with business unit heads

Technical Asset & Lifecycle Management

• Establish enterprise-wide standards for asset inventory, lifecycle management and technical currency; oversee strategic planning for platform refreshes and upgrades
• Ensure 100% adherence to regional financial regulations, data residency laws and security standards; own compliance strategy and audit relationships
• Define BC/DR strategic approach aligned with Group policies; oversee BC/DR testing programs and approve frameworks, RTOs and RPOs for critical services

Vendor & Integration Partner Leadership

• Own strategic vendor relationships for the DFS space; conduct vendor service reviews addressing performance issues and driving value optimization
•  Lead strategic discussions on vendor dependency reduction and build-vs-buy decisions; approve contracts, renewals and commercial terms
• Define strategic approach to integration partner management; review partner performance trends and support resolution of high-impact partner issues

Financial Management & Cost Optimization

• Develop, manage and optimize complete OPEX budget for Technical Operations; lead annual budget planning and track monthly performance with variance explanations
• Identify strategic cost optimization opportunities through operational efficiency, automation and vendor rationalization; conduct value-for-money assessments
• Challenge operational cost structures driving OPEX reduction while maintaining service quality; provide regular financial reporting to executive leadership

Center of Excellence & Standardization

• Build and lead Technical Operations CoE as a key strategic pillar and KPI; drive standardization of operational procedures, tooling, monitoring frameworks and runbooks across subsidiaries
•  Create micro-level service management capabilities aligning with Group IT service management; measure and report on CoE maturity progress
• Ensure operational consistency as the domain platforms & systems roll out to new subsidiaries; establish operational readiness frameworks for new launches; facilitate knowledge sharing across geographies

Cross-Functional Leadership & Collaboration

• Maintain tight collaboration with DFS Configurations and Delivery leadership ensuring seamless build-to-run handoffs; coordinate deployment planning and risk assessment
• Jointly assess operational readiness providing unified recommendations; engage business stakeholders on service disruptions and maintenance windows
• Define organizational structure, roles and operating model for Technical Operations; establish RACI matrices and accountability frameworks

People Leadership & Organizational Development

• Lead and mentor two direct report Managers (Core Platform and Integrations); set clear expectations, KPIs and strategic objectives; conduct performance reviews and succession planning
• Set cultural tone establishing norms around collaboration, accountability, operational excellence and continuous learning aligned with Group culture
• Drive talent strategy including attraction, retention, development; establish career pathways; ensure strategic priorities cascade throughout all levels

Continuous Improvement & Innovation

• Drive continuous improvement mindset; champion innovation initiatives improving operational efficiency and reducing toil
• Identify and sponsor proof-of-concept projects for emerging technologies; allocate budget balancing current operations with future capability development.

Qualifications

EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS

• Technical Operations Leadership: Minimum 8-10 years of progressive experience in technical operations, production support or site reliability engineering with at least 3-5 years in leadership roles managing teams in mission-critical 24/7 environments.
• Financial Services/Mobile Money Platform Operations: Minimum 5-7 years operating financial services platforms, core banking systems, payment processing or mobile money platforms with proven track record maintaining high availability and managing operations in regulated environments with compliance requirements.
• Multi-Country Operations Management: Demonstrated experience managing technical operations across multiple locations, countries or business units, navigating diverse regulatory or operational requirements and supporting expansion initiatives or multi-site coordination (experience can include project-based multi-country exposure).
• Change Leadership: Proven track record leading operational improvements such as automation initiatives, process standardization, SRE practices adoption or service management framework implementation while maintaining service delivery and managing stakeholder expectations.
• Vendor & Partner Ecosystem Management: Strong experience managing relationships with application vendors, integration partners or third-party service providers, including vendor performance management, multi-party incident coordination, escalation management and driving service improvements across external dependencies.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Demonstrated ability collaborating with peer leaders across delivery, infrastructure, security and business units, influencing outcomes through relationship management, coordinating cross-functional initiatives and establishing working agreements with teams outside direct control.
• Budget & Cost Management: Experience managing operational budgets, contributing to budget planning processes, tracking expenditures, identifying cost optimization opportunities and participating in vendor negotiations or commercial discussions.
• Incident & Crisis Management at Scale: Extensive hands-on experience leading major incident response for business-critical systems, coordinating response across multiple teams and vendors, managing stakeholder communication during critical outages and implementing systematic improvements from post-incident reviews.

ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS

• University degree in Information Technology, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Relevant professional certifications such as ITIL Foundation or higher, AWS/Azure/GCP certifications or equivalent demonstrating operational and technical expertise

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THE ROLE PURPOSE

The Senior Officer, Operations & Maintenance – Other Platforms is a technical subject matter expert and hands-on technical lead responsible for the stability, availability and operational excellence of the integration middleware platform and partner integrations. This role provides deep technical expertise during complex incidents, leads partner and vendor escalations, drives automation initiatives, serves as the primary technical consultant for operations engineers and acts as the operational liaison with delivery teams and integration partners on production readiness. The Senior Officer shapes integration operational practices through technical mentorship, knowledge management and continuous improvement, ensuring world-class operational standards and capability development across the integrations domain.

the KEY responsibilities 

Advanced Integration Operations & Multi-Party Incident Leadership

• Serve as primary technical expert for complex integration and middleware incidents requiring advanced troubleshooting across distributed systems, multiple fault domains (middleware, APIs, partner systems, network connectivity), coordinating with internal teams, integration partners, and vendors while providing hands-on guidance to operations engineers. Execute the 1-5-10 mandate for complex integration incidents, conduct thorough root cause analysis for recurring problems involving partner dependencies, and set the technical standard for integration incident response excellence.

Deep Integration Platform Knowledge, Operational Readiness & Change Advisory

• Maintain deep expertise in integration middleware architecture, API management, message queuing, event-driven patterns and synchronous/asynchronous communication protocols (REST, SOAP, gRPC) serving as technical authority on integration operations. Monitor integration flows and partner connectivity proactively identifying performance degradation or emerging issues; execute complex maintenance activities including middleware upgrades, partner onboarding and integration performance tuning. Serve as primary operational liaison with delivery teams on new integration onboarding, assessing operational readiness evaluating API observability, distributed tracing coverage, error handling, security (mTLS, OAuth2, certificate management) and partner support arrangements. Review proposed integration changes assessing technical risk, partner coordination requirements and cross-platform impact; lead technical validation and post-deployment verification for complex integration changes.

Partner Technical Relationship, Automation & Observability

• Lead complex partner escalations as primary technical interface, engaging partner technical teams with comprehensive diagnostic information while building effective technical relationships and navigating varying technical capabilities and support models. Track partner escalations, evaluate partner technical responses and drive knowledge transfer to reduce partner dependency. Lead automation initiatives for integration operations including automated health checks, transaction monitoring, partner connectivity validation and self-healing solutions. Implement advanced observability for integration flows focusing on "golden signals" (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) using distributed tracing (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry) and log aggregation (ELK stack, Splunk). Drive CI/CD improvements including automated testing, quality gates and deployment automation strategies (blue-green, canary releases). Manage integration workloads on container platforms (OpenShift/Kubernetes) including ConfigMaps, Secrets, CRDs, Network Policies and container security.

Knowledge Management, Compliance, Mentorship & Process Improvement

• Champion knowledge management creating high-quality knowledge base articles on partner-specific troubleshooting, integration patterns and resolution procedures while guiding engineers on effective documentation practices. Develop integration runbooks, partner escalation guides and diagnostic workflows; maintain partner technical documentation. Evaluate integration operational compliance ensuring adherence to security standards (API security, mTLS, OAuth2, secret management) data residency requirements and regulatory expectations; support audits by providing integration technical documentation. Serve as primary technical consultant for operations engineers; mentor junior engineers through hands-on coaching during partner incidents and integration troubleshooting; share technical knowledge on integration patterns, API technologies and observability tools. Facilitate technical discussions across teams; represent integrations team in technical forums; identify inefficiencies in integration operational processes and lead process improvement initiatives; contribute to Technical Operations Center of Excellence documenting integration best practices.

Qualifications

EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS

Must Have

• 3-5 years of progressive experience in software development, DevOps, platform engineering, integration development or technical operations with at least 1-2 years working with APIs, microservices or integration technologies in production environments, demonstrating growth in technical complexity and responsibility with experience participating in incident resolution for distributed systems.
•  Working knowledge of integration technologies (RESTful APIs, message queuing, containerization - Docker, Kubernetes basics) with hands-on experience in at least one of: API gateways, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis) or middleware platforms. Understanding of integration architecture patterns (synchronous/asynchronous communication, event-driven architecture, pub/sub messaging) and ability to troubleshoot technical issues across multiple system components (applications, APIs, databases, network).
• Experience with automation and scripting using at least one programming/scripting language (Python, Bash, PowerShell, Go, JavaScript) to solve operational problems and automate tasks. Familiarity with CI/CD concepts and tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) and basic understanding of Infrastructure-as-Code concepts (Terraform, Ansible).
• Experience with monitoring, logging and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Splunk, cloud-native monitoring solutions) with understanding of key performance metrics and ability to use logs and metrics to diagnose issues. Familiarity with "golden signals" (Latency, Traffic, Errors, Saturation).
• Good technical communication and collaboration skills with demonstrated ability to document technical solutions, create basic runbooks or troubleshooting guides and work effectively with cross-functional teams.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to financial services, banking, payment systems, fintech or mobile money platforms; understanding of security and compliance in regulated industries (KYC, data protection, audit requirements); experience working with external partners, vendors or third-party APIs.
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, OpenShift, ECS) including deployment and configuration management (ConfigMaps, Secrets); understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience with advanced observability concepts (distributed tracing - Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, Zipkin; APM tools; log correlation across distributed systems); knowledge of integration security practices (OAuth2, JWT, TLS/SSL certificates, secrets management, API security vulnerabilities).
• Experience with Service Management frameworks (ITIL Foundation certification or practical Incident/Problem/Change Management experience); involvement in technical mentorship activities (onboarding, knowledge-sharing, creating training materials); exposure to multi-region, multi-environment operations.

ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related technical field (equivalent combination of education and experience may be considered for exceptionally qualified candidates).
• Relevant professional certifications such as ITIL Foundation or higher, Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD), cloud platform certifications (AWS, Azure, GCP) or API management certifications; advanced degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or related technical field.