M-Pesa Africa: Infrastructure Architect

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:

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.

Your responsibilities will include:

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.

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Network Engineering, or related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years technical background inclusive of infrastructure architecture experience
• Domain experience in Financial Services and Financial technologies will be an added advantage 
• Has demonstrable knowledge and experience in both Agile and Waterfall methodologies 
• Strong background in data center and cloud network architecture, compute and virtualization, storage and backup,
• hybrid cloud design, IaC and automation, CI/CD and infrastructure observability.
• Experience with platform engineering, service mesh, and secure enclave deployment.
• Familiarity with Fintech or payments-grade infrastructure standards.
• Clear understanding of layered security, zero trust, and identity federation.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience architecting Infrastructure: Hybrid/multi-cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP),
• container orchestration (Kubernetes), IaaS/PaaS adoption models.
• Deep understanding of architectural implications for regulatory compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI-DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001).
• Experience integrating Zero Trust Architecture, identity management (OAuth2, OpenID, SAML), and encryption protocols into enterprise design.
• Familiarity with architecture risk assessments, threat modelling, and secure-by-design principles.
• Strong experience in designing high traffic, scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure. 
• Understanding of cloud architecture and services (e.g., serverless computing, containerization, orchestration). 
• Experience leading or supporting large-scale modernization or transformation programs (e.g., core banking revamp, mobile money overhaul, ERP replacement).

Desirable

• Kubernetes cluster design and day-to-day operations experience.
• Experience integrating 3rd-party observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Splunk).
• Exposure to edge computing, CDN integration, and mobile backend scaling strategies.
• Cloud certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Architect Expert).
• Experience of continuous delivery and release automation processes. 
• Knowledge and interest in market leading Payments technologies, suppliers and innovations 
• Understanding of technical and architectural policies and ability to transform that policy into detailed technical design. 
• Experience in Vendor assessment and technical due diligence for major platform selections.

Closing date for Applications: 16 July 2025.

The base location for this role is, Vodacom Cape Town.  

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.