Group Head: Platform Engineering at Cellulant

Cellulant is a mobile commerce and content company that manages delivers and bills for digital content and commerce service actualized over telecom network. The industry defines this segment as mobile Value Added Service (VAS) or Wireless Premium Rate Service Provider (PRSP) We are a member company of the Cellulant group which has commercial services running in Kenya, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Zambia, South Africa , Uganda , Botswana and the EU. Cellulant Nigeria have rolled an innovative and top-class business and technolgy solutions to banks, multinational companies like Guinness Nigeria Plc being her technology partner in the 'Guinness Greatest Eleven Nigerian football legend’o, Pepsi Sponsored FIFA U-17 football tournament hosted by South Korea, Procter and Gamble(P&G), Nigerian Breweries, automobile giants like Toyota Nigeria Limited, Fast moving and consumer goods (FMCGs) companies like Unilever, Mr. Biggs and a host of other companies like Promasidor, Smithline and Beechams SKG etc.

JOB DESCRIPTION:

• Primary Responsibility: Ensure the end-to-end health of shared infrastructure and platforms for Cellulant products and services.
• Collaboration: Work with other technology teams to drive operations and automation. Accelerate product delivery. Ensure consistent and stable services.
• Technology Oversight: Oversee the correct operation of technologies across environments (security, DevOps, Observability, data engineering) using in-house and third-party teams and services.
• Platform Resilience and Availability: Provide a resilient, secure, and highly available platform for products and services.
• Strategy and Implementation: Define, get approval for, and implement the overall strategy for platform delivery.
• Environment Oversight: Oversee all pre-production and production environments outside of application software. Manage systems for SCM, CI, testing (functional, integration, end-to-end, performance, security), and CD in a hybrid cloud environment.
• Cloud Provisioning and Security: Principal officer for automated cloud provisioning (virtualized and containerized workloads) and security/network setup.
• Capacity and Demand Management: Lead capacity and demand management for the hybrid cloud.
• Cost Management: Oversee cost management within the functional area.
• Adjacent Cloud Engineering Systems: Lead and oversee observability systems and security monitoring systems. Liaise with Site Reliability Engineering and Information Security teams.

Key Relationships: Software engineering team, Quality Engineering team, Security Engineering Platform engineering(observability, infrastructure, data engineering, Corporate IT).

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Develop and implement Cellulants platform engineering management strategies and vision aligned with company goals, optimizing technology platforms to meet internal and customer needs.
• Establish, deliver, and refine a platform engineering roadmap ensuring current platforms deliver value, scalability, resilience, security, and operational efficiency.
• Recruit, empower, and retain a high-performance platform engineering team comprising Cloud, Network, DevOps Engineers, Observability Specialists, and Data Architects, meeting business expectations.
• Define a technology roadmap fostering a DevOps culture through automated platform capabilities, supporting customer-focused product development.
• Create tools for software engineering teams to test and deploy code efficiently across environments.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to automate manual tasks, enhancing platform performance.
• Anticipate product features by tracking market trends and collecting stakeholder input.
• Develop infrastructure supporting services across multiple platforms with resilience and performance.
• Ensure a common, consistent, and flexible platform supporting product development.
• Ensure the various systems built on the platform by the business are coherent, and actively identify and deliver common elements.
• Provide technology expertise across the company, supporting software engineering activities.
• Build an effective cloud function to leverage infrastructure as code, and enforce standards across the platform estate.
• Develop and build a well-documented and centralized API estate, promoting reuse, and supporting API versioning and end-to-end lifecycle management.
• Oversee platform service design with a focus on security and swift response to threats.
• Implement policies for secure platform management including access control and disaster recovery.
• Manage data usage promoting robust engineering for operational and analytical purposes.
• Working with Software Engineering, Architecture, and Operations teams, provide an in-depth evaluation of evolving and mature technologies, and help shape the customer technology roadmap.
• Participate in the Technology leadership team, driving company strategy and coordinating support for platform engineering issues as the primary contact.
• Keep abreast of emerging trends in platform engineering, such as cloud, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, Observability, and Data, identify best practices, and participate in developing or setting standards to improve the overall platform engineering practice.
• Proactively reassess platform engineering activities and manage stakeholder expectations.
• Analyze platform security strengths, weaknesses, and risks, establishing contingency plans.
• Resolve cross-functional issues and coordinate working groups.
• Provide mentorship, career development, performance feedback, and complete performance evaluations for team members.
• Maintain platform engineering documentation, escalate risks promptly, and drive continuous improvement through root cause analysis and project documentation.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE.

Must-Have Experience:

• At least eight (8) years of working experience driving platform engineering strategy development, and implementation within the FinTech and or Financial Services environment.
• Prior experience working in a payment services provider environment.
• Past working experience as a Software Engineer, Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, and Cloud Architect would be advantageous but not mandatory
• Depth and breadth of experience in cloud engineering including automated provision (also known as Infrastructure as Code -using Terraform / Ansible / AWS Cloud formation) of virtual machines, Kubernetes environments, load balancers, firewall appliances, etc.
• Depth and breadth of experience in Observability solutions using ELK/EFK stacks, Prometheus, Jaeger, Grafana, or equivalent
• Depth and breadth of experience working with SCM (Bitbucket / Gitlab), delivery pipelines (CI/CD - Jenkins / Circle CI, Gitlab) with automated testing in a cloud-native environment.
• Working experience with data systems such as data lakes (AWS S3), data warehouse (AWS Redshift / Click house, Apache Hadoop), relational (MySQL / PostgreSQL) and non-relational databases (Mongo / Cassandra)
• Working experience with common data pipeline tools such as Apache Kafka, AWS Kinesis, or equivalent.

Must-Have Experience:

• Strong and demonstrable experience in managing platform security and emerging security threats and vulnerabilities.
• Ability to clearly articulate data engineering concepts, and can demonstrate these through a deep level of experience and knowledge.
• Demonstrable in-depth knowledge and first-hand experience with modern complex development tool chains, bug tracking systems, continuous integration, and version control systems in both commercial and open source/agile settings.
• Excellent at building rapport with Software, SRE teams, and other stakeholders to ensure their platform needs are met.
• Excellent at building and retaining high-performance teams.
• Working experience with agile delivery using Scrum, Kanban, or equivalent.
• Experience in building and retaining high-performance teams.
• Ability to build rapport with delivery stakeholders to ensure software development outcomes are met.
• Above-average communication, negotiation, and consensus-building skills.
• Execution-oriented - a pathfinder or pathmaker to ensure timely product delivery.
• Experience in building and retaining high-performance teams with proven team management skills including the ability to develop staff by identifying and fulfilling gaps in skills and knowledge
• Experience in partner selection and management and contract negotiation with 3rd parties and other service providers
• An open mind towards innovative ways of solving problems and creating solutions for staff through the appropriate use of technology.

Qualifications:

• A Bachelor’s Degree preferably in Computer Sciences, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Software Development, or any other relevant and related field.
• Certification in Linux system administration, Windows system administration, Cloud computing, and Containerization.
• Certifications in scripting, network engineering, database administration, or web development.

SKILLS AND PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES.

Skills:

• Strategic Leadership in Platform Engineering: Demonstrated expertise in leading and developing high-performance teams across disciplines (e.g., cloud engineering, DevOps, data architecture) with a focus on recruiting, empowering, and retaining talent. Ability to align platform engineering strategies and vision with the company's goals, ensuring the application of technology platforms meets both internal and customer needs.
• Innovative Roadmap and Strategic Planning: Proven ability in establishing and executing a dynamic platform engineering roadmap, aligning technology adoption and platform evolution with strategic business objectives. This includes driving scalability, resilience, security, and operational efficiency while staying responsive to changing business and technology landscapes.
• Technology and Security Mastery: Strong foundation in technology with a specialization in designing secure, robust platform services. This includes a deep understanding of DevOps practices, automation, cloud architectures, and the proactive management of security threats and vulnerabilities to ensure platforms are secure by design.
• Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement: Experience in fostering a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence through the effective use of automation, observability tools, and DevOps methodologies. Commitment to root cause analysis, documentation best practices, and leveraging insights for ongoing optimization.
• Stakeholder Engagement and Communication: Skilled in managing and exceeding stakeholder expectations, including articulating systems investments, performance metrics, and deliverables to both internal and external audiences. Ability to navigate complex requirements and drive alignment across diverse teams.
• Emerging Trends and Best Practices: A keen eye for emerging trends in platform engineering and technology, with a commitment to lifelong learning and innovation. Ability to identify and integrate best practices, new tools, and methodologies to enhance platform agility, performance, and overall engineering practice.

Method of Application