Senior Manager: Intelligent Solutions

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together one story at a time.
- With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

As the Senior Manager: Intelligent Solutions you will be responsible for driving AI strategy, execution, and governance across retail operations. You will be responsible for setting the vision, defining AI roadmaps, and ensuring that AI initiatives deliver tangible business value.

Job Description

Senior Manager: Intelligent Solutions

About the Role:
As the Senior Manager: Intelligent Solutions you will be responsible for driving AI strategy, execution, and governance across retail operations. You will be responsible for setting the vision, defining AI roadmaps, and ensuring that AI initiatives deliver tangible business value.

As the Senior Manager you will work Technology and Data Teams to inform the Operations AI platform architecture, Operations AI solution design. You will drive Operations AI program governance, and Operations AI value realization. You will establish best practices, ensure AI models are ethical and compliant, and drive innovation to maintain a competitive advantage.

This role will be instrumental in defining AI investment priorities, aligning initiatives with business objectives, and fostering a culture of AI-driven decision-making. This role requires a blend of technical expertise, strategic foresight, and strong leadership to build a high-performing AI capability that continuously evolves with emerging technologies and industry trends.

Key Responsibilities:

- Define and drive the Operations AI strategic vision, ensuring alignment with the organization’s broader digital transformation and business strategy
- Oversee Operations AI program governance, ensuring AI initiatives adhere to regulatory requirements, ethical AI principles, and organizational compliance frameworks
- Oversee the design and implementation of robust, scalable, and innovative AI solutions, managing the entire end-to-end AI solution blueprint and roadmap ensuring alignment with technical and architectural standards
- Oversee the design of scalable, modular solutions that efficiently accommodate growing data volumes, user demands and evolving business needs, while enabling future upgrades and AI advancements
- Develop AI performance tracking mechanisms, defining clear KPIs to assess the effectiveness of AI initiatives and optimize AI model performance
- Establish AI ethics and risk management guidelines, ensuring AI solutions align with Absa values and regulatory requirements
- Identify emerging AI technologies and assess their potential impact on business operations, positioning the organization for future AI advancements
- Work with Data and Analytics teams to drive Operations AI data management and governance, ensuring AI models are trained on high-quality, unbiased data to produce reliable and ethical outcomes
- Work with other disciplines in Absa to ensure the strategic establishment and ongoing governance of standards, processes, and frameworks across all AI programs, ensuring the programs comply with industry best practices and strict adherence to regulatory requirements

What We’re Looking For:
Education:

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Technology or a related field
- Relevant certifications in AI/ML

**Experience**:

- 5+ years of experience in project management within a tech or innovation-focused environment.
- Solid understanding of AI concepts such as machine learning, natural language processing, and data analytics.
- Experience working with AI platforms, cloud technologies (e.g., Azure, AWS, Google Cloud), and data pipelines.
- Strong stakeholder engagement and communication skills.
- Agile certification (e.g., Scrum Master, SAFe) is a plus.

Skills:

- Proficiency in AI and machine learning frameworks
- Experience with MLOps practices for managing AI model lifecycles
- Understanding of AI Model Deployment & MLOps

Education

Bachelor's Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Physical, Mathematical, Computer and Life Sciences (required)
- Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised_