Manager Platform Engineering MPA - Cape Town - Vodafone Group

Description

Job Description:

We are Africa's largest fintech, providing financial services to over 60 million customers and 5 million businesses, with transactions of over $1.2 billion a day across 8 countries.

Driven by innovation, we provide Africa's leading super app, the M-PESA Super App, pioneering a digital financial ecosystem that empowers customers and businesses to send and receive money and payments worldwide, provides access to affordable credit and savings propositions, and offers best-in-class solutions to grow wealth and businesses.

United in our purpose to transform lives, we explore and deliver solutions that address customer needs consistently, believing success comes from our customers' and community's success.

Role Purpose:

• The Platform Engineering Manager is responsible for the end-to-end health of the shared infrastructure and platform powering M-Pesa products and services.
• Working with technology teams, this role drives operations and automation to accelerate product delivery and ensure consistent, stable services.
• This person ensures technologies employed across environments, including Security and DevOps, are correctly operated through in-house and third-party teams and services, providing a resilient, secure, and highly available platform for our products and services.
• They establish, deliver, and refine a platform engineering roadmap to keep all platforms and products current, delivering value to product engineering teams and supporting internal stakeholders on scalability, resilience, security, capacity, and operational maintenance.
• Implementing cloud-native infrastructure, enabling microservices, and extensive Open APIs use, as well as achieving zero service outage, requires enabling CI/CD tools and DevSecOps.

Responsibilities:

• Align Strategy with Execution:
• Provide input into the Platform strategy.
• Delivery of the Strategic Platform Engineering RoadMap.
• Designing and implementing solutions with high availability and scalability.
• Build business cases for different Platform Engineering propositions.
• Interface between Product squads and Cloud Infrastructure teams.
• Drive Platform Engineering (DevOps) Maturity:
• Create and implement a DevOps SRE strategy, involving roadmap creation, process introduction, metric and system implementation for function success.
• Manage and optimize the flow of value through the ART by ongoing evaluation of practices associated with DevSecOps and Release on Demand in the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.
• Drive an engineering culture of continuous improvement (CI) based on data, e.g., Platform Performance metrics.
• Ensure technical debt and associated impacts are visible to stakeholders.
• Ensure risks are managed, remove impediments, and implement mitigations.
• Build and maintain a core set of metrics understanding infrastructure and platform performance.
• Platform Engineering Business as Usual:
• Manage feature delivery requested by the ARTs during PI planning.
• Manage the product backlog for the Platform engineering team.
• Ensure operational SLA and KPIs are met by the DevOps team.
• Help transform the M-pesa HUB into a cloud-native environment.
• Migrate all cloud-based Dev, Test, and UAT/OAT environments to the Private cloud on the HUB for cost savings.
• Manage yearly capacity upgrades.
• Manage capacity planning for all platforms and infrastructure.
• Ensure SLAs are met for vulnerability and patch management on Infrastructure across M-PESA.
• Drive automation of patch management across all platforms.
• Implement CI/Cd toolset and pipelines on the HUB and other platforms.
• Implement infrastructure and code to automate virtual environment spin-up.
• Approve user access to platforms and environments under Platform Engineering's control.
• Line manager to allocated people in Platform Engineering.
• Facilitate and guide platform engineering discussions in the weekly architectural forum.
• Manage infrastructure asset register for M-Pesa Platform Engineering.
• Responsible for Incident and Problem management for L2 support on the HUB.
• Responsible for network connectivity delivery between markets, HUB, and AWS.
• Perform monthly User and ARM group attestation for the M-Pesa HUB.
• Implement processes and controls within Platform Engineering to improve and maintain the CSB Score to 4.0 or higher.
• Maintain platform availability of 99.99% across all platforms.
• Responsible for Infrastructure support and monitoring on AWS non-production systems.
• Deliver AWS-hosted systems for non-production and production environments through Terraform code development.
• Responsible for PAM (Privilege Access Management) on the M-Pesa HUB.

Prepare and Facilitate PI Planning:

• Facilitate PI Planning readiness through fostering Continuous Exploration.
• Assist economic decision-making by facilitating feature and capability estimation by teams and rolling up to Epics, where necessary.
• Prepare for and facilitate PI Planning events.
• Summarize Team PI Objectives into Program PI Objectives.
• Resource management and recruitment associated with ART, including 3rd party resources.

Guide Program Execution:

• Track feature delivery.
• Help manage risks and dependencies.
• Escalate and track impediments.
• Facilitate periodic synchronization events, including ART sync, Systems Demos, and Inspect and Adapt workshops.
• Ensure effective vendor management.
• Provide regular reporting and analysis to drive effective decision-making and continuous improvement.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree: A bachelor's degree in Business, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is essential.
• Master's Degree: An MBA or a master's degree in a related field is advantageous.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, Scripting/Automation, Tooling Pipelines: Terraform, GoCD, GitHub, Nexus, etc.
• Strong understanding of AWS and Azure (and other cloud services) and surrounding services.
• Expertise in cloud technical architectures and deployment models (serverless vs server-managed).
• Experience implementing and improving infrastructure monitoring and engineering metrics.
• Management experience in a FinTech environment or at least infrastructure in a financial service environment – minimum 2 years.
• Technical experience working with infrastructure technologies – Min 5 years.
• Background in IT Execution, with hands-on experience in Platform engineering and infrastructure, and with CI/CD, who understands modern architecture patterns, the digital technology space, and can simplify and decouple legacy systems.
• Familiar with information security vulnerabilities and risk management.
• Working with PaaS, API Microservices-driven environments.
• Strong experience managing complex build and run PaaS environments.
• Good understanding of DevOps or DevSecOps.
• Proven experience in technologies: server, network, and firewall hardware; Infrastructure Virtualization; Data Centers; VMware; Cloud infrastructure.

Personal Attributes:

• Self-starter.
• Ability to work under pressure and without supervision.
• Servant leader.
• Excellent analytical thinking.
• Excellent critical thinking.
• Adaptive, empathetic, collaborative, and positive mindset.