Executive Head: Software Engineering M-Pesa Africa

Business Unit:

• M-Pesa is a pioneering fintech business and global market leader in mobile money. Starting from 2007 as a convenient means by which the unbanked and underbanked could make digital payments, M-Pesa has now grown to offer over 60 million active customers Financial Services, Enterprise, Merchant and Retail solutions. We are proud of our work in enabling the digital economy in our markets, and in driving financial inclusion.

• M-Pesa Africa is the largest FinTech providing services to more than 60 million customers and 5 million businesses solutions across Financial Services, Enterprise, Merchant and Retail. We are now well on our way to becoming the preferred digital payment method across the markets that we serve, for both in-store, remote and online payments. With headquarters in both Nairobi and Johannesburg, we serve markets that include Kenya, Tanzania, DRC, Lesotho, Ghana, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.

• We are a united, energetic and passionate team. A place where leaders coach, teams connect, and everyone is empowered to go further, faster. A place where heroes become superheroes; through growth, opportunity, and the chance to work with the best minds in FinTech.

Role Purpose:

Drive the strategic evolution of M-Pesa Africa’s Mobile Financial Services (MFS) ecosystem by leveraging and optimizing existing platform capabilities, building new solutions and platforms to meet the future commercial requirements of M-Pesa, in the operating markets,  ensuring alignment with M-Pesa Africa’s global financial services footprint. This involves leveraging existing platforms and capabilities,key technology partners, maximizing cost efficiency, and delivering scalable, high-performance financial solutions that reinforce and improve M-Pesa Africa’s competitive advantage.

• Technology-Driven Competitive Edge: Spearhead the development and deployment of next-generation MFS platforms, ensuring that all solutions remain cost-effective, market-relevant, and seamlessly integrated across M-Pesa Africa’s core M-Pesa markets.

• Strategic Industry Influence: Proactively shape the roadmap of partner and industry platform development, ensuring that technology innovation aligns with M-Pesa Africa’s commercial strategy and the evolving mobile payments landscape.

• Investment Governance & ROI Optimization: Sponsor and oversee M-Pesa Africa’s Group Investments in shared assets and technology platforms, ensuring a world-class Time-to-Market (TTM) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) across all M-Pesa target markets.

• Innovation & Emerging Use Cases: Lead collaborative innovation programs with key technology partners to pioneer ground-breaking use cases in Mobile Payments, driving financial inclusion and accelerating MFS adoption.

• Centre of Excellence (CoE) Leadership: Establish and maintain a global Centre of Excellence in Mobile Payments, leveraging expertise from M-Pesa Africa and strategic partners to provide technical guidance, market insights, and best practices for secure, scalable, and competitive deployment of Mobile Financial Services.

• Development Governance Setting and Adopting Standards: Ensure the MPA software development standards are articulated, aligned with best practice and adopts the latest in industry standards. Protecting MPA software IP and value, is key. Establish the required governance to measure and enforce that standards are complied to and enforced.

• SAFe AGILe Operating Model: MPA follows the SAFe AGILe Operating model, where applicable in conjunction with waterfall, where applicable (i.e. infrastructure delivery). Software Engineering is central to the adoption and effective operation of our AGILe way of working, to align business requirements, collaborative delivery, effective and efficient resource utilisation and delivering value to the business.

Your responsibilities will include:

Strategic Platform Alignment & Stakeholder Engagement

• Drive and Influence the Technology Strategy of MPA, supported by budgets and plans to deliver on the business strategy.
• Drive close collaboration with the Commercial Teams to ensure solution development aligns seamlessly with market and functional roadmaps and priorities
• Engage with senior stakeholders, including Group SLTs and OpCo CEOs, ensuring transparency, strategic alignment, and informed decision-making throughout the platform development lifecycle.
• Provide executive-level briefings on platform roadmaps, supplier strategies, and emerging opportunities in Mobile Financial Services (MFS).

Technology & Supplier Strategy

• Proactively collaborate with strategic technology partners to analyze, influence, and accelerate the development of next-generation mobile payments capabilities.
• Own and govern platform development initiatives, ensuring M-Pesa Africa retains final approval authority for all major architectural and engineering decisions.

Enterprise Architecture & Platform Engineering Excellence

• Collaborate with Mobile Payments, Enterprise Architecture & Design team, ensuring all design solutions adhere to best practices in scalability, security, and performance optimization.
• Oversee software development governance, ensuring alignment with M-Pesa Africa’s global technology strategy and compliance frameworks.

Quality Assurance & Operational Resilience

• Direct collaboration with Assurance, Security, Testing Strategy, adhere to test automation framework, tooling ecosystem, and quality assurance methodology.
• Partner with the Operations Team to ensure platforms deliver high availability, reliability, and service-level performance, meeting business-critical demands.

Financial & Productivity Optimization

• Work closely with Finance Teams to ensure efficient budget allocation, cost governance, and strategic investment in platform innovation.
• Continuously seek opportunities for process optimization, driving enhancements in test automation, collaboration tools, and development productivity
   

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• Graduate Level Qualification: In Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Certification in different methodologies including Agile and Waterfall
• Relevant Certification, i.e. cloud services, from recognised educational and learning institutions, i.e. Skillsoft

Core competencies, knowledge and experience:

• Deep Expertise in Mobile Payments & Financial Services Architecture – Extensive knowledge of distributed payment architectures, real-time transaction processing, regulatory compliance (e.g., PSD2, PCI-DSS), and mobile wallet ecosystems. Proven ability to design and optimize scalable, high-availability financial platforms that meet stringent security and latency requirements.
• Enterprise-Grade Software Development Management – 8+ years leading full-lifecycle software development, including requirements engineering, CI/CD pipeline optimization, version control strategies (GitOps), and software configuration management. Experience in managing complex microservices-based, event-driven, and API-first architectures.
• Strategic Business & Customer-Centric Technical Leadership – Strong focus on business impact, product-market fit, and end-user experience when driving technology decisions. Expertise in A/B testing, data-driven decision-making, and predictive analytics to refine digital financial products for enhanced customer engagement.
• Advanced Communication & Technical Influence – Ability to communicate intricate software engineering concepts, architectural trade-offs, and cloud-native strategies to both C-level stakeholders and development teams. Skilled in negotiating with third-party vendors, driving architectural consensus, and governing technical debt.
• Process Optimization & Analytical Problem-Solving – Expert in fault-tolerant system design, observability frameworks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus), and automated testing strategies (TDD, BDD, chaos engineering). Adept at implementing DevSecOps principles, container orchestration (Kubernetes), and high-throughput messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ) to solve scalability and resilience challenges in financial applications.
• Global & Cross-Border Fintech Experience – Experience working in multi-national software teams and designing payment solutions for diverse regulatory environments. Knowledge of cross-border remittances, currency exchange automation, and global KYC/AML compliance frameworks is an advantage.

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Technical Skills:

• Programming Languages: Proficiency in multiple programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, C++).
• Software Development: Deep understanding of software development methodologies (e.g., Agile, Scrum).
• System Architecture: Experience with designing and implementing complex software systems.
• DevOps: Knowledge of DevOps practices and tools.

Soft Skills:

• Problem-Solving: Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Adaptability: Ability to adapt to new technologies and methodologies.
• Collaboration: Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to work well in a team environment.

Leadership and Management Skills:

• Team Leadership: Proven experience in leading and managing software engineering teams.
• Project Management: Strong project management skills, including planning, execution, and delivery.
• Mentorship: Ability to mentor and develop junior engineers.
• Communication: Excellent communication skills for interacting with stakeholders, both technical and non-technical.

Closing date for Applications: 12 March 2025.

The base location for this role is, Vodacom Midrand Campus.  

The Company's approved Employment Equity Plan and Targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. As an Equal Opportunities employer, we actively encourage and welcome people with various disabilities to apply.
Vodacom is committed to an organisational culture that recognises, appreciates and values diversity & inclusion.