Senior Solutions Architect (Digital Platforms) - M-Pesa Africa

About the role

M-Pesa Africa is looking for a Senior Solutions Architect to design, govern and evolve the architecture of its digital platforms and digital payment channels across its markets. The role sits at the intersection of the M-Pesa Super App, mini-app ecosystem, QR/hosted payment pages and NFC channels, and partner integrations, setting architectural standards and strategic direction. It is a senior individual contributor role with broad influence across engineering, product, compliance and group-level stakeholders.

Key responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end architecture of the Super App, including its mini-app platform, SDK and marketplace, across six markets, and govern the design, versioning and lifecycle of the SDKs.
• Define technical standards for mini-app onboarding, integration, security review and lifecycle management, and drive the move to composable UI, micro-frontends, headless/BFF and cloud-native architectures.
• Establish architecture governance, design review standards and reference architectures, and work with Compliance, Legal, Risk and Market teams on regulatory and data protection requirements.
• Own the architecture of digital payment channels (QR, hosted payment pages, NFC/Tap-to-Pay), including security, tokenisation and merchant integration standards.
• Architect integration patterns between the Super App, core M-Pesa systems, third-party developers and partners, and govern the developer portal and sandbox environments.
• Design resilient, secure architectures with sandboxing, permission models and fraud prevention, and mentor mid-level and junior architects.
• Produce executive-ready artefacts such as C4 diagrams, ADRs and strategy presentations, and lead vendor evaluations.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Electrical/Computer Engineering or a related field.
• 8+ years in solutions/platform architecture, mobile or digital engineering, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead capacity.
• Proven track record designing enterprise-scale digital or Super App platforms in financial services, fintech or telecommunications.
• Demonstrated ownership of a Super App / mini-app platform architecture and SDK strategy at scale.

Required skills

• Mobile and web architecture on AWS and/or Azure, and working knowledge of iOS and Android constraints.
• SDK design, REST/GraphQL APIs, Apache Kafka, micro-frontends and composable UI.
• Digital platform security (sandboxing, mTLS, OAuth2/OpenID Connect) and payment channel architecture (QR, NFC).
• C4 modelling, ADRs and architecture review board processes.