Head of Department - Digital Business Support Systems

About the role

Safaricom is hiring a Head of Department for Digital Business Support Systems in Westlands, Nairobi. Reporting to the Chapter Lead - Digital IT, the role provides strategic planning, modernization leadership and operations excellence for the Business Support Systems (BSS) domain, covering Revenue Management, Value Added Services (VAS), Enterprise Integration, Contact Centre, Order Management and Financial Reporting. It drives the shift from monolithic legacy platforms to cloud-native, AI-native, TMF Open API-compliant architectures and leads the transformation to intelligent, predictive customer care and digital self-service.

Key responsibilities

• BSS modernization: lead the move to cloud-native BSS, define and run the 3-year technical roadmap (LRP) with TMF Open API compliance and composable platform design, own architecture standards, and drive vendor selection, partnerships and data governance.
• Intelligent CARE: turn fragmented channel tools into AI-driven self-service customer care platforms, embed AI and automation for predictive care, and enable Customer 360 / MDM and GTM tooling.
• Agile delivery: shift from ticket-based waterfall to composable platforms with weekly releases, reusable artefacts and templates, aiming to cut time-to-market by more than 30% and deliver 100% on PI commitments.
• Centralized SRE: set up 24/7 maintenance, predictive ops and zero-touch operations with over 99.99% availability and MTTR under 30 minutes, including AIOps and business continuity.
• Financial and governance leadership: manage departmental CAPEX (about KES 5B) and OPEX (about KES 2B) budgets, ensure compliance with Safaricom policies and ISO standards, and drive agile adoption and squad structure.
• Customer focus: deepen team connection to customers, simplify processes through digitalisation and take customer-centric decisions.

Required profile

• Degree in Information Services, BSc Computer Sciences, BSc Electrical Engineering or similar tertiary qualification.
• Over 10 years of management experience in a technical delivery and operations domain.
• Experience leading Business Support Systems (planning, delivery and operations).
• Knowledge of billing and VAS products and services.