Kenya
Job Description
We are hiring a Senior Infrastructure Architect to support M-Pesa in achieving its goal of becoming the #1 FinTech company in Africa, and 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.
Key Responsibilities:
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.
Technical Experience & Qualifications
Essential Experience:
- 8+ years in infrastructure or cloud architecture roles within high-availability environments.
- Strong background in:
- Data center and cloud network architecture
- Compute and virtualization
- Storage and backup
- Hybrid cloud design
- Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and automation
- CI/CD and infrastructure observability
- Platform engineering experience including service mesh and secure enclave deployment.
- Familiarity with Fintech or payments-grade infrastructure standards.
- Clear understanding of layered security models, zero trust architecture, and identity federation.
- Demonstrated hands-on experience in:
- Architecting hybrid/multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Container orchestration using Kubernetes
- Designing and implementing IaaS and PaaS adoption models
- Strong understanding of compliance architecture for frameworks like PCI-DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001.
- Proven experience integrating:
- Zero Trust Architecture principles
- Identity protocols (OAuth2, OpenID, SAML)
- Enterprise-level encryption solutions
Desirable Skills:
- Kubernetes cluster design and day-to-day operations.
- Integration with observability platforms such as Datadog and Splunk.
- Experience with edge computing, CDN integration, and scaling mobile backends.
- Relevant cloud certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Architect Expert).
- Knowledge of continuous delivery and automated release pipelines.
- Interest in emerging payments technologies, suppliers, and innovations.
- Ability to translate technical and architectural policies into actionable design.
- Experience in vendor evaluation and technical due diligence for major platform decisions.
Educational & Professional Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Network Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent work experience).
- 8+ years of technical experience with a strong focus on infrastructure architecture.
- Industry experience in Financial Services and Financial Technologies is a strong plus.
- Knowledge of both Agile and Waterfall methodologies.
About Us
We are the leading telecommunication company in East Africa. Our purpose is to transform lives by connecting people to people, people to opportunities and people to information. We keep over 42 million customers connected and play a critical role in the society, supporting over one million jobs both directly and indirectly while our total economic value was estimated at KES 362 Billion ($ 3.2 billion) for the 12 months through March 2021.
We are listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) and with annual revenues of close to KES 298 Billion ($2.5 billion) as at March 2022. We were founded in 1997 as a fully owned subsidiary of Telkom Kenya before a 40 percent acquisition by Vodafone Group PLC in May 2000, and a public offering of 25 percent shares through the NSE in 2008. Under the management of Vodafone Group PLC, we welcomed Michael Joseph, as our first CEO, a few months later in July of 2000. He led the company’s growth to accommodate 16.71 million subscribers from the previous 20,000, largely owing to innovative products like M-PESA in 2007.
