Senior Data Architect – M-Pesa Africa

About the role

M-Pesa Africa is seeking a Senior Data Architect to design, govern, and evolve its enterprise data landscape across multiple markets. The role sits at the intersection of mobile money, payments, AI, and analytics, influencing engineering, product, compliance and group‑level stakeholders.

Key responsibilities

• Own the enterprise data architecture across M-Pesa Africa’s multi‑market environment, covering transactional, operational, analytical and AI/ML domains.
• Define and enforce data modelling standards, data flow patterns, and integration architecture for real‑time and batch pipelines.
• Lead architecture design for platforms supporting payment rails, API analytics, fraud and AML detection, and regulatory reporting.
• Drive transition to modern data architectures such as data mesh, lakehouse and event‑driven patterns.
• Establish enterprise‑wide data governance frameworks, data quality standards and master data management policies.
• Design integration patterns and streaming/CDC pipelines using technologies like Apache Kafka and Oracle GoldenGate.
• Enable AI/ML use cases by designing feature stores, data pipeline standards and model‑serving infrastructure.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Electrical/Computer Engineering or a related field.
• At least 3 years of senior or lead experience in data architecture, data engineering or closely related disciplines.
• Proven track record designing enterprise‑scale data platforms in financial services, fintech or telecommunications.

Required skills

• Data modelling (conceptual, logical, physical) for OLTP and OLAP systems.
• Cloud data platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and big‑data technologies (Spark, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift).
• Data integration patterns: ETL, ELT, Change Data Capture (CDC), event streaming and API‑driven exchange.
• Data governance frameworks and tools (DAMA‑DMBOK, Apache Atlas, Collibra).
• Streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka.