M-Pesa Africa: Senior Data Architect – Safaricom
Job Purpose
To own and lead the enterprise data architecture across M-PESA Africa’s multi-market environment—spanning transactional, operational, analytical, and AI/ML data domains—translating complex data challenges into scalable architectural solutions that support real-time payment rails, compliance, and fraud detection.
Roles & Responsibilities
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Data Architecture & Strategy: Own enterprise-wide data architecture across a multi-market environment, define data modeling standards and integration patterns for real-time/batch pipelines, and drive the transition to modern architectures like data mesh and lakehouses.
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Data Governance & Standards: Establish and champion enterprise data governance frameworks, master data management (MDM) policies, data classification, lineage standards, and cross-border data sovereignty compliance.
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Integration & Platform Architecture: Architect data integration patterns between M-PESA core systems and analytics layers, collaborating with API gateway teams and governing streaming/CDC pipelines using Kafka and GoldenGate.
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AI & Analytics Enablement: Design data architectures underpinning AI/ML workflows (transaction monitoring, customer intelligence), define feature store designs, and evaluate vector databases and LLM-ready data infrastructure.
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Leadership & Stakeholder Engagement: Serve as the senior architecture voice in review boards, mentor data engineers, produce executive-ready architecture artifacts (C4 diagrams, ADRs), and lead platform vendor evaluations.
Qualifications
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Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or a related field.
Skills, Experience & Competences
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Extensive technical experience in data architecture and data engineering, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead capacity within financial services, fintech, or telecommunications.
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Deep expertise in OLTP/OLAP data modeling, cloud data platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), and big data technologies (Spark, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift).
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Proficiency in integration patterns (ETL/ELT, CDC, event streaming via Apache Kafka, API-driven exchange) and data governance tools (DAMA-DMBOK, Apache Atlas, Collibra).
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Strong strategic leadership, communication, and mentoring capabilities to guide cross-functional technical teams and present to executive leadership.