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:

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.

Observability & Monitoring

• Configure and maintain observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace).
• Define system health metrics, implement alert thresholds, and ensure visibility across platforms.

Automation & AIOps

• 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.

Governance, Risk & Compliance

• 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.

Tools & Platform Ownership

• 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.

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.

Team & Vendor Coordination

• 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.

Qualifications

Knowledge and Experience

• 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

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.