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 w