M-Pesa Africa: Infrastructure Architect at Vodafone Global Enterprise

Role Purpose:

• As part of the M-PESA Africa Architecture Team, you will lead the design and standardization of hybrid infrastructure across cloud and on-premises environments, ensuring alignment with M-PESA's platform modernization, cloud adoption, and zero-trust security goals.
• You will work closely with platform teams, DevOps engineers, domain architects, and operations stakeholders to ensure our digital infrastructure is resilient, cost-optimized, and future-ready.
• This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure engineering, architectural governance, and cloud transformation—critical in enabling the real-time, high-volume, secure transactions that power over $1.2 billion in daily value exchange across Africa.
• The agile SAFe Framework has been adopted across M-PESA and in line with the framework you will acquire a systems thinking mindset that supports the continuous flow of value through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline enabling and fostering a DevOps culture.
• Working closely with Agile Teams, you will support the delivery teams through architectural enablers, technical runways, and hands-on guidance.

Your responsibilities will include:

Infrastructure Architecture & Planning

• Define and maintain the target-state infrastructure architecture across data centres, cloud platforms, and edge environments.
• Lead the roadmap for infrastructure modernization including virtualization, hyperconverged systems, containerization, and network overlays.
• Establish infrastructure patterns and blueprints for compute, storage, backup, disaster recovery (DR), and network architectures.
• Align infrastructure strategy with enterprise architecture principles, performance objectives, and service-level agreements (SLAs).

Cloud and Hybrid Enablement

• Drive hybrid and multi-cloud architecture strategy across AWS, Azure, and private cloud (e.g. OpenStack, VMware).
• Architect secure, compliant infrastructure-as-code pipelines, integrating Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools.
• Guide cloud landing zone design, VPC architecture, identity federation, and interconnect strategies.
• Ensure observability, cost governance, and elasticity in cloud-native workloads.

Security, Resilience & Compliance

• Embed security-by-design principles into infrastructure blueprints, including microsegmentation, encryption, and zero-trust access.
• Architect HA/DR solutions across critical systems, ensuring geographic redundancy and failover readiness.
• Ensure infrastructure compliance with PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and local regulatory requirements.
• Support infrastructure risk assessments and penetration testing preparation.

Governance & Collaboration

• Participate in Architecture Review Boards to assess infrastructure impact and conformance to strategy.
• Collaborate with DevOps, SRE, security, and operations teams to promote infrastructure reliability and automation.
• Engage with vendors, cloud providers, and technology partners for capability assessment and solutioning.
• Produce and maintain infrastructure architecture documentation, standards, and runbooks.

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Network Engineering, or related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years technical background inclusive of infrastructure architecture experience
• Domain experience in Financial Services and Financial technologies will be an added advantage
• Has demonstrable knowledge and experience in both Agile and Waterfall methodologies
• Strong background in data center and cloud network architecture, compute and virtualization, storage and backup,
• hybrid cloud design, IaC and automation, CI/CD and infrastructure observability.
• Experience with platform engineering, service mesh, and secure enclave deployment.
• Familiarity with Fintech or payments-grade infrastructure standards.
• Clear understanding of layered security, zero trust, and identity federation.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience architecting Infrastructure: Hybrid/multi-cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP),
• container orchestration (Kubernetes), IaaS/PaaS adoption models.
• Deep understanding of architectural implications for regulatory compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI-DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001).
• Experience integrating Zero Trust Architecture, identity management (OAuth2, OpenID, SAML), and encryption protocols into enterprise design.
• Familiarity with architecture risk assessments, threat modelling, and secure-by-design principles.
• Strong experience in designing high traffic, scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure.
• Understanding of cloud architecture and services (e.g., serverless computing, containerization, orchestration).
• Experience leading or supporting large-scale modernization or transformation programs (e.g., core banking revamp, mobile money overhaul, ERP replacement).

Desirable

• Kubernetes cluster design and day-to-day operations experience.
• Experience integrating 3rd-party observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Splunk).
• Exposure to edge computing, CDN integration, and mobile backend scaling strategies.
• Cloud certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Architect Expert).
• Experience of continuous delivery and release automation processes.
• Knowledge and interest in market leading Payments technologies, suppliers and innovations
• Understanding of technical and architectural policies and ability to transform that policy into detailed technical design.
• Experience in Vendor assessment and technical due diligence for major platform selections.

Closing date for Applications: 16 July 2025.