Head of Digital Engineering at Safaricom Kenya

Brief Description

Reporting to the Director - Information Technology, the Head of Digital Engineering is responsible for leading and managing digital engineering organization that models, delivers and influences digital software engineering. This role will be responsible for delivering digital portfolio and its associated programs.

• This role will be responsible for recruiting, maintaining and growing appropriate software engineering capacity and competencies to enable the target business outcomes within schedule and budget.
• This role is responsible for managing the budget and sourcing for the engineering organization, working closely with the business tech leads, Architecture chapter lead, and Practice Leads to define and plan future workforce growth and sourcing strategies, and budgeting accordingly
• This role is responsible for defining, establishing, and maintaining engineering and release quality and performance standards across the delivery organization, with support from Practice Leads
• The role will also coach and influence the entire Safaricom organization on Agile mindset and way of working.
• The role holder will lead the design, build, and operational management of highly secure and scalable software for the business and works to guarantee the reduction or removal of bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
• This role will also encompass both quality assurance and continuous/automated software testing.
• S/He plays a mentorship role to software engineers, constantly promoting improvement in their professional skills and career development plan.
• S/He is the main Technology Evangelist for Digital Transformation and Agile Delivery. Will be responsible for driving the platforms, processes and technical capability to deliver on the Agile Transformation.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage the digital engineering organization and digital program portfolio
• Enable the digital vision by leading technical delivery aligned with the digital vision, strategy, and objectives
• Facilitate and empowers teams in achieving high performances in Solution delivery, ensuring quality standards are achieved.
• Establish an Engineering culture of passion for innovation and relentless improvement to the digital engineering organization
• Direct recruitment, capacity, performance and finances for the digital engineering organization
• Manage sourcing strategy and strategic vendor relationships to achieve goals of innovation, speed and efficiency.
• Provide thought leadership on foundational enterprise architecture and IT strategy best practices and disruptive technology trajectory and implications.
• Define and implement engineering Center of Excellence for Software engineering, Quality Engineering, DevOps, IT Automation.
• Build and mature CI/CD pipelines and champion build, release and deployment automation & strategies for agility and speed of delivery.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Master’s or bachelor’s degree in software engineering, or any other related field
• Ten or more years of experience in IT Delivery, preferably in designing, building and managing large software factories
• Five to seven years of leadership responsibilities in large delivery organizations, managing cross-functional teams and/or organization-wide programs, influencing senior-level management and key stakeholders effectively within complex context
• Extensive experience in IT strategic planning, organization design and development
• Extensive experience in leading engineering functions through digital transformations in complex and dynamic environments, in order to take advantage of digital opportunities and enable digital business outcomes
• Extensive experience in establishing agile principles and processes within large engineering organizations
• Solid technical background, with hands-on experience in automated; agile environments delivering infrastructure; monitoring and tooling to high-traffic web applications
• Professional experience and knowledge of digital and Telecommunications industries strongly preferred