M-Pesa Africa : Manager – Application & Observability Operations

Description:
We are Africa’s largest fintech providing financial services to more than 60 million customers and 5 million businesses, with transactions of over $1.2 billion a day across 8 countries. Driven by a strong passion in 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 across the world, enables them with access to affordable credit and savings propositions, and provides them with best-in-class solutions to easily grow their wealth and businesses. United in our purpose to Transform Lives, we are determined and energetic in exploring and delivering solutions that consistently address our customers’ needs as we believe that we can only succeed if our customers and the community around us are succeeding.

About The Role:

To manage the day-to-day operations, observability, and performance of M-Pesa’s critical applications and supporting platforms. The role ensures service reliability, timely incident restoration, compliance with SLAs, and delivery of automation and AIOps use cases. This includes working with internal teams, markets, and third-party vendors to maintain stability and drive continuous improvements in service delivery.

Key Accountabilities And Decision Ownership:

1. Application Operations & Support

• Manage daily performance and stability of assigned M-Pesa applications across markets.
• Own incident management, ensuring timely restoration of service and post-incident reviews.
• Coordinate with L2 vendors, infrastructure, and local market teams to resolve issues and fulfill service requests.
• Ensure technical SLA compliance for applications run by Product Ops or third parties.
• Maintain SOPs, configuration documents, and contribute to audit readiness and DR plans.

2. Observability & Monitoring

• Configure and maintain observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace).
• Define system health metrics, implement alert thresholds, and ensure visibility across platforms.
• 5–7 years in IT service operations, application support, or observability roles.
• 2+ years experience in leading or coordinating technical teams or third-party vendors.
• Strong understanding of ITIL processes (incident, change, problem, request).
• Hands-on experience with observability tools and automation platforms.
• Knowledge of infrastructure (Linux, Windows, TCP/IP, VPN, firewalls), databases (Oracle, MongoDB, Postgres), and cloud-based systems.
• Familiarity with mobile payments or financial service platforms is an advantage.
• Technical / Professional Qualifications

1. 3. Automation & AIOps
2. 4. Governance, Risk & Compliance
3. 5. Tools & Platform Ownership
4. 7. Team & Vendor Coordination

• Implement and maintain automated workflows for incident notification, escalation, and resolution.
• Support deployment of AIOps use cases (e.g., anomaly detection, noise suppression, automated RCA).
• Work with engineering and support teams to enable automation of repetitive tasks and enhance tool efficiency.
• Ensure applications meet data protection, security, and compliance standards.
• Participate in capacity planning and risk mitigation activities.
• Coordinate and support system audits and control documentation.
• Administer and maintain key enterprise tools including observability (Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace), collaboration (SharePoint, Teams, O365), and ticketing/ITSM platforms.
• Coordinate onboarding of applications into monitoring tools, ensuring tagging, dashboard setup, and alert workflows are completed.
• Manage integration of monitoring and automation tools with CI/CD pipelines and operational workflows.
• Oversee access provisioning and compliance for managed tools (e.g., Active Directory, SSO, MFA), ensuring audit readiness and license tracking.
• Work with procurement and platform owners to coordinate renewals, license utilization reviews, and vendor support contracts.

6. Stakeholder Communication

• Serve as a first escalation point for critical issues and major incidents.
• Ensure clear communication during incidents and delivery of incident reports to senior stakeholders.
• Provide regular reporting on service health, incident trends, and automation outcomes.
• Manage a team of engineers/specialists.
• Liaise with third-party vendors for incident escalations, maintenance, and service improvements.
• Contribute to vendor performance tracking and compliance to service levels.

Knowledge And Experience

• Essential:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or related field.

• Itil Foundation Certification.

• Experience with application monitoring, incident coordination, and automation tools.
• Strong problem-solving and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Cloud or DevOps certifications (e.g., Azure Administrator, Kubernetes).
• Experience with Agile/DevOps environments.
• Experience with mobile financial services or high-availability platforms.
• Familiarity with RPA or low-code/no-code automation platforms.

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.