Specialist - Technical Lead Technology Information at MTN

JOB DESCRIPTION

Strategic Input

• Work with “Senior Fintech Technical” Lead/s, to identify key changes to fintech systems in the future from technological, commercial, business and consumer behaviour perspectives.

Planning, Operational and Delivery

• Provide input into the development of the 3 year and 1 year plans for all fintech systems such as MoMo, Insurtech and Loans & Lending.
• Ensure these plans are aligned with business requirements and budgetary prioritisation.
• Ensure fintech system designs are developed in order to achieve these plans.
• Ensure planned fintech projects are delivered on time to meet operational requirements.
• Assisting with information to ensure the effective utilisation of fintech systems infrastructure, scalability and capabilities.
• Ensure fintech systems meet business requirements and are sufficient for growth in customer numbers and demand.
• Provide input into detailed fintech systems design ensuring impact on existing systems and processes is managed.
• Ensure knowledge transfer (including support document ) to operations team minimising escalations to development team.
• Capture of business requirements and their analysis.
• Monitor performance of deliverables, investigate performance and functionality issues, and ensure future designs are optimised to prevent issues found.
• Continually identify the following in respective area:
• Capacity Upgrades that are required due to Network Traffic;
• Software Upgrades required to ensure adherence to maintenance agreements;
• Aspects of a system that have not been performing optimally that require changes to architecture; and
• Hardware that is reaching end of life and requires replacement.
• In the Fintech space, “Planning” and “Operational” areas need to function as a cohesive unit.  This means that ‘working’ relationships with Operational area units must include:
• Discussing status of new/current projects;
• Discussing system issues that may or may not require planning analysis;
• Ensuring that Operations is involved in a project every step of the way, such that they can prepare for ATP/UAT- work and any roll-out activities;
• Provide Operations the opportunity to provide ideas on system evolution from the perspective of maintaining platforms on a day to day basis;
• Perform ATPs with Operations and vendors; and
• Help test system functioning through the application of custom scripts

Governance 

• Follow all corporate governance procedures.
• Ensure that changes to the current environment are properly documented and tested before promoting into production. Post production changes should be documented and managed.
• Support the prioritisation process to drive prioritisation of requirements and initiatives in functional areas to ensure timeous delivery of requirements.
• Support Revenue Assurance functions to understand issues and resolve any revenue issues or leakage.
• Create visibility of changes to core systems, data and products by informing the organisation of changes.
• Support assessment of Portfolio maturity on an annual basis.
• Influence and implement aspects of data security policies.
• Support the creation of critical Policies, Processes or Procedure such that Business risk is managed which also ensures that any ISO certifications can be maintained and ensure that they are being utilised in day to day operations.
• Manage vendor interaction  through RFPs and verification of BOMs.
• Ensure system documentation is sufficiently detailed and up to date to ensure business continuity and prevent over-reliance on a few individuals

Communication & Co-ordination

• Liaise with Marketing regarding product development with respect to fintech systems capabilities and requirements.
• Consolidate requirements for fintech systems and decide on clear development paths while managing what may be opposing views from different stakeholders.
• Build the understanding of existing and emerging fintech systems technologies and capabilities across the business.
• Provide MTN Group with subject matter expertise related to fintech systems.

Financial 

• Vendor relations, and quarterly/monthly reporting:
• Be part of regular vendor meetings;
• Convey problem areas to vendors and request action plans;
• Ensuring that vendors supply quarterly reports on system health and utilisation and any other items as per contract; and
• Ensuring that assistance is provided to obtain maximum value for minimum cost from vendors.
• Budget Requirements
• Assist in tracking financial information such as:
• Breakdown of spend (tangible and intangible software, licenses and hardware);
• Project costs; and
• Requisition, PO and Invoice numbers.
• All funding must be capitalised within the targets set by MTN.
• Assistance with input on Yearly CAPEX Plans and tracking spend through the year
• Ensure that team members are working together to ensure that spend is kept track of.
• Must work with Line Management and Senior Fintech Technical Lead/s to:
• Tally up all spend and budget positions on a regular basis;
• Extract all Roadmap-items from team members and supply full budget requirement breakdowns each year; and
• Ensure that capitalisation targets are achieved.

Project Management

• Develop and drive the execution of agreed projects. 
• Drive the implementation, tracking, monitoring and compliance of Projects.
• Co-ordinate project reporting.
• Risk management.

Customer

• One of the primary objectives is to ensure the team delivers on requirements set by the business and make sure that changes needed on platforms owned take place on time and within budget. In addition, all changes must be of a high quality such that bugs are kept to a minimum to ensure smooth testing cycles.
• Ensure that all systems (or set of systems) are properly documented for Operations by the Vendor/s; and that System/Project handovers are done to Operational areas.  Partake in ATPs (Acceptance Test Procedures) together with vendors and assist with automation of any ATP procedures.      In addition, ensure that all systems (or set of systems) are properly documented for Operations by the vendor and that they are handed over.

Core Planning Functions

• Ensure that the team works on the development of products and perform capacity planning of services in line with business requirements and budgetary priorities within IT.
• Ensure that the team defines, plans, architects and implements requirements with vendors and Operational areas.
• Ensure that System Documentation is updated with each project, showing functional architecture, use cases, functional logic and that quality is determined by whether an alternative vendor could use it to reproduce a systems functioning with least 95% level of accuracy.
• Ensure that Requirement Analysis and the supply of Functional Specifications to vendors happens for each project/initiative.
• Ensure that each System has up to date architecture documentation that is an accurate and true reflection of all systems.
• Monitor vendor performance and hold regular meetings to go through all issues.  Healthy vendor relationships must always be maintained. 
• Ensure that one performs the necessary analysis, design, modelling and documentation tasks necessary to pass MTN IS governance forums.
• Ensure that vendors (whether they do development or system configuration) are correctly driven, and that in-house business and resultant functional logic is maintained within MTN through the supply of fully fledged and detailed specifications and ensure that vendors are driven to fulfil these.
• Ensure that any common business rules, metrics and measures set in IS are followed.
• Planning of a systems footprint, licensing and utilisation must take place for any special events or “special” events like Black Friday. This includes:
• Software Upgrades on platforms;
• Hardware replacements or forklifts;
• New hardware; and
• Licensing upgrades.
• The Fintech Technical Lead shall be able to work in a “agile” team or in a “waterfall” team to deliver projects and system objectives.

QUALIFICATIONS

Job Requirements 

Education / Business Degree:

• 3 year Degree / Diploma from a tertiary institution.
• Honours/Masters Degree Advantageous.
• Fluent in English.

Work Experience: 

• At least 3 years’ experience in the IT/Telecoms industry and specifically the application of Information Technology within the telco space of which at least 1 years should be applicable experience at an internationally recognised operator or Fintech company. 
• The Fintech Technical Lead must be widely read and know about many facets of Telecoms including open-source projects and Fintech technologies in general; touching on MoMo, Loans & Lending and Insuretech technologies and current “leading practice” for delivery in Telco industries.
• Minimum of 1 years’ experience in an area of specialisation; with experience in supervising others.
• Experience working in a medium organisation.
• Project management and business optimisation experience would be advantageous; including working in “Agile” and “Waterfall” teams.
• Exposure to managing external vendor/supplier relationships and service level agreements.
• The following experience is a must for this position
• A background in System Architecture & Design which includes the creation of highly detailed functional requirements which describe deep functional logic of a system;
• Fintech Services (MoMo, Loans & Lending and Isuretech),
• Microservices; and
• Some solid background in programming (e.g. Node, React, Angular, Java, Python, C/C++, C#, VB.Net, Erlang etc) is mandatory.