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.