Jobs at Safaricom Kenya

DESCRIPTION
 
We are pleased to announce the subject career opportunity within Technology (M-Pesa Africa) reporting to the Technology Director.

Role Purpose

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 50 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 now making strides to deepen and strengthen its offering to consumers and businesses in our operating countries, making it easier for them to manage their money and get more from their limited resources.

Working within the scaled agile framework (SAFe), you will perform all aspects of the Release Train Engineer role. This includes being accountable for, and facilitating the execution of, ART processes. Your role will be to manage impediments, escalating when necessary, to manage risk, to help ensure value delivery and help drive relentless improvement within your Agile Release Train and across your teams. You will also have an opportunity to directly support our Lean-Agile Transformation to the MPA Target Operating model, helping to coach leaders, teams and Scrum Masters and develop the “agile mindset”.

Key Role Responsibilities

Exhibits Servant leadership:

1. Listen and support teams in problem identification and decision-making
2. Create an environment of mutual influence
3. Understand and empathize with others
4. Encourage and support the personal development of each individual and the development of teams
5. Coach people with powerful questions rather than use authority
6. Think beyond day-to-day activities; apply systems thinking
7. Support the teams’ commitments
8. Be open and appreciate openness in others
9. Encourage collaboration between teams, Product Management and System Architects

Help align Strategy with execution:

1. Collaborate with Lean Portfolio Management, Product Management and System Architects to help ensure we are working towards the right outcomes
2. Collaborate with Lean Portfolio Management, Product Management and System Architects to help ensure we are working towards the right outcomes
3. Understand and operate within Lean Budgets and ensure adherence to Guardrails

Improve Flow:

1. Manage and optimize the flow of value through the ART through ongoing evaluation of practices associated with DevSecOps and Release on Demand in the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
2. Provide input on resourcing to address critical bottlenecks

Prepare and Facilitate PI Planning:

1. Facilitate PI Planning readiness by fostering the Continuous Exploration process
2. Assist with economic decision-making by facilitating feature and capability estimation by teams and the roll-up to Epics, where necessary
3. Prepare for and facilitate PI Planning event
4. Summarize Team PI Objectives into Program PI Objectives
5. Resource management and recruitment associated with ART including 3rd party resources

Guide Program Execution:

1. Track the delivery of features
2. Help manage risks and dependencies
3. Escalate and track impediments
4. Facilitate periodic synchronization events, including the ART sync, Systems Demos and Inspect and Adapt workshops
5. Ensure effective vendor management
6. Provide regular reporting and analysis to drive effective decision making and continuous improvement

Encourage Innovation:

1. Help drive the Lean User Experience (UX) innovation cycle
2. Drive regular innovation and exploration cycles to improve ROI and customer satisfaction in line with the SAFe framework

Drive Relentless Improvement:

1. Drive relentless improvement via Inspect and Adapt workshops; assess the agility level of the ART and help them improve
2. Foster Communities of Practice and the use of engineering and Built-In Quality practices
3. Work with the Value Management Office on program execution and operational excellence

Additional accountabilities:

1. Supplier Management and negotiation on scope and quality
2. Understanding of compliance regulations and practices (anti-money laundering, fraud controls, biometric solutions.
3. ART and team design to support flow and manage ART performance
4. Resource Management and Coaching
5. ART Budget reporting and planning

Apply if you have:

Essential

1. Degree Qualification - Preferably STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)
2. Relevant certified Scrum Master qualification, for example, SAFe Scrum Master or equivalent
3. Agile Experience including international suppliers or markets – minimum 5 years
4. Contagious passion for, and commitment to, driving mobile money growth and innovation
5. Communication and relationship management experience
6. Excellent problem analysis and resolution skills to support work in reactive and proactive environments

Desirable

1. SAFe certified Release Train Engineer
2. ITIL Service Management qualification or experience
3. Agile Transformation and Hybrid/Waterfall supplier experience
4. Demonstrable working knowledge and competence using JIRA and Confluence
5. Mobile Payment or Financial Payment Service Experience
6. ICA certificate in Anti-Money Laundering

What you can expect from us:

1. We believe in a fair and robust interview process
2. We have a robust flexible total reward scheme
3. Dedicated support and mentoring/coaching
4. Opportunity to develop and progress – plus a solid dedication to work-life integration. It all means you’ll have everything you need to advance your career and achieve your full potential.

Note to Applicants

As part of our recruitment process we will request the below documentation which will be required as soft copies at a later stage of the process.

1. An updated CV with a confirmation of three referees- 2 must be professional and must have supervised you at some point, the other referee can be a colleague in the same professional field. If the referees are within the same organization that you are working with, you will need to confirm to us that it’s okay to contact them in writing (via email). This also includes all references within the Human Resources department.
2. Scanned copy of certificate of good conduct from the CID (Less than 1 year old) - Applicable to Kenyans Only
3. Scanned copy of certificate from Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) – Applicable to Kenyans Only
4. Scanned copy of University Certificate
5. Scanned copy of your National ID / Passport-Legal Form of Identification

go to method of application »

DESCRIPTION
 
We are pleased to announce the subject career opportunity within Technology (M-Pesa Africa) reporting to the Senior Manager-Software Engineering.

About M-Pesa Africa

M-Pesa, is a pioneering fintech business and global market leader in mobile money. From starting in 2007 as a convenient means by which the unbanked and underbanked can make digital payments, M-Pesa has now grown to offer >50 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 currently supporting 6 markets and scaling with a mission to build a ONE M-Pesa, the largest FinTech and digital ecosystem in Africa by 2025.

Our Culture Pillars: Customer Focused; Innovation; Experiment & Be bold; Teamwork

Role Description

To work in an agile team, building engaging functional systems that maximise customer experience and revenue. Responsible for development against a product backlog, participating in planning, designing, and building features, assuring quality, deploying across environments, and supporting effective operations.

What you will be doing

1. Develop end-to-end digital products utilising technologies and tools such as Java / Maven, Python, C ++, SonarQube, Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Kibana, Splunk and Apigee API.
2. Develop and utilise CICD Pipeline and Automation technologies and tools such as Azure Pipeline, GitHub, JFrog, Jenkins, Ansible and Liquibase
3. Work with the cloud computing teams to build and run scalable applications as public, private, and hybrid clouds using Cloud Native tools such as ASW Pipeline.
4. Demonstrate ideas, products, and features in iteration reviews
5. Create new ideas and demonstrate them.
6. Work with agile Release Trains
7. Ensure commitments are met
8. Work in an agile delivery framework using tools like Jira and Confluence
9. Hands-on delivery to the highest quality and fixing issues both during development and on production.
10. Innovative and open-minded.
11. Working on ways to automate and improve development and release processes
12. Testing and examining code written by others and analysing results
13. Ensuring that systems are safe and secure against cybersecurity threats
14. Identifying technical problems and developing software updates and ‘fixes’
15. Working with software developers and software engineers to ensure that development follows established processes and works as intended
16. Deploy new code, updates, and fixes
17. Provide Level 2 technical support, including root cause analysis for production errors
18. Experience as a DevOps Engineer or similar software engineering role
19. Problem-solving attitude
20. Collaborative team spirit

Competencies you require for the role

Working With Others

1. Consciously takes steps to make the most of every conversation/interaction
2. Identifies people’s needs, interests, and motives to be able to influence the decisions they make
3. Communicates simply to excite and engage people
4. Pro-actively adapts own style and approach to build rapport, and work with others more effectively
5. Builds and maintains strong relationships and networks

Operational Excellence

1. Targets effort and resources on high-value, high impact activity  
2. Focuses on achieving maximum performance and driving continuous improvement
3. Thinks about processes and problems cross-functionally and end-to-end
4. Uses knowledge of products, technology, process, systems, and policy to solve problems

Creativity and Innovation

1. Finds creative ways to exploit opportunities and solve problems
2. Takes risks and pushes what is possible
3. Experiments with unorthodox approaches

Business Know-how

1. Uses data and research to make decisions that are competitively and financially robust
2. Balances current and future needs
3. Thinks and acts like an owner of the business 
4. Acts in line with legal, regulatory, professional, and ethical standards

Working With Change

1. Responds flexibly to changing situations
2. Manages the business and people aspects of change to drive performance

Project and Programme Management

1. Defines scope and deliverables in terms of time, cost, quality, and business benefit 
2. Schedules activity and identifies resource needs, dependencies, and synergies  
3. Evaluates progress, mitigates risks, and addresses issues

Architecture and Design

1. Translates business and customer requirements into technology requirements
2. Defines architecture and design of systems and solutions to meet current and future business needs
3. Service and solution development
4. Develops systems, services, and solutions to agreed specifications

Testing and Evaluation

1. Defines test cases and acceptance criteria based on user requirements
2. Reports and interprets test results  Assesses the effectiveness of tests and testing tools

Implementation and integration

1. Installs, configures, integrates, and optimises systems, services, and solutions

Apply if you have:

1. Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent
2. At least 3 years’ experience in coding in a non-university setting.
3. Experience with technologies and tools such as Java / Maven, Python, C ++, SonarQube, Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Kibana, Splunk and Apigee API.
4. Experience with CICD Pipeline and Automation technologies and tools such as Azure Pipeline, GitHub, JFrog, Jenkins, Ansible and Liquibase
5. Strong understanding of end-to-end API and microservice architecture and the ability to design, develop and implement scalable, elastic microservice based platforms end-to-end
6. Strong understanding of SOAP, Rest APIs and Apigee APIs.

What you can expect from us:

1. We believe in a fair and robust interview process
2. We have a robust flexible total reward scheme
3. Dedicated support and mentoring/coaching
4. Opportunity to develop and progress – plus a solid dedication to work-life integration. It all means you’ll have everything you need to advance your career and achieve your full potential.

Note to Applicants

As part of our recruitment process, we will request the below documentation which will be required as soft copies at a later stage of the process.

1. An updated CV with a confirmation of three referees- 2 must be professional and must have supervised you at some point, the other referee can be a colleague in the same professional field. If the referees are within the same organization that you are working with, you will need to confirm to us that it’s okay to contact them in writing (via email). This also includes all references within the Human Resources department.
2. Scanned copy of certificate of good conduct from the CID (Less than 1 year old) - Applicable to Kenyans Only
3. Scanned copy of certificate from Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) – Applicable to Kenyans Only
4. Scanned copy of University Certificate
5. Scanned copy of your National ID / Passport-Legal Form of Identification