Head, Core Technology at InterSwitch

Interswitch Limited is an integrated payment and transaction processing company that provides technology integration, advisory services, transaction processing and payment infrastructure to government, banks and corporate organizations. Interswitch, through its “Super Switchâ€Â provides online, real-time transaction switching that enable businesses and individuals have access to their funds across the 24 banks in Nigeria and across a variety of payment channels such as Automated Teller Machines (ATMS), Point of Sale (PoS) terminals, Mobile Phones, Kiosks, Web and Bank Branches.

Job Summary

• The Head, Core Technology manages the effective deployment of solutions through the combined application of software engineering and systems administration practices to support multiple business divisions in this fast-paced payment industry. This role is responsible for all site reliability engineering within the organization. Ensure stability and scalability, drive the overall availability, reliability and resiliency of Interswitch products and services while anticipating capacity growth through careful planning and awareness of trends.

Responsibilities

• Direct and oversee infrastructure developments and maintenance to ensure the continuous availability, reliability and stability of all applications to ensure minimal downtime and disruption to business operations.
• Ensure system reliability for the production critical databases; web-based consumer-facing applications (VM-based and containerized); and our core payment switch.
• Determine the vision and strategy for the core technology team in line with enterprise architecture and overall business objectives.
• Develop a strategic architecture plan ensuring data features are prioritized appropriately, estimates are reliable, benefits can be realized, and design activities are proactively monitored and tracked
• Lead definition of architectural standards for all technology services and components (applications, data, integration, technology, security, business).
• Present business and IT leaders with signature-ready recommendations for adjusting policies and projects to achieve target business outcomes that capitalize on relevant digital disruptions.
• Elicit the most complex business requirements using a variety of methods such as interviews, document analysis, workshops, and workflow analysis to express the requirements in terms of target user roles and goals.
• Identify and communicate the actions needed to implement the function's strategy and business plan within the business area or department; explain the relationship to the broader organization's mission, vision and values; motivate people to commit to these and to doing extraordinary things to achieve local business goals.
• Drive the security of all applications, ensuring that the appropriate security program is in place to minimizes breeches and ensure the uninterrupted availability of the infrastructure.
• Lead in detecting and analyzing identified vulnerabilities and remediate any security gaps in line with the security incident management procedure.
• Develop, implement and drive adherence to business activities within the area of responsibility comply with relevant external regulatory technology governance, and internal policies to minimize business risk and to protect the reputation of the organization.
• Manage and report on the performance of a substantial, diverse team; set appropriate performance objectives for direct reports or project/account team members and hold them accountable for achieving these; take appropriate corrective action where necessary to ensure the achievement of team / personal objectives.
• Use the organization's formal development framework to identify the team's individual development needs.
• Enable the team to deliver by providing technical guidance, coaching, development and feedback to ensure that they are able to deliver the required quality while also contributing to their engagement.

Formal Education & Certification

• University degree in the field of computer science or “STEM” major (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) or related field.

Knowledge & Experience

• Minimum of 12 years of IT and business/industry work experience including architecture design and systems deployment, software lifecycle management, site reliability engineering and infrastructure automation
• Leadership experience in managing multiple, large, cross-functional teams or projects, and influencing senior level management and key stakeholders.
• Solid knowledge of Electronic funds transfer process with minimum of 8 years’ experience.
• Requires exposure to multiple, diverse technologies and processing environments.
• Minimum of 5 years’ experience in managing teams
• Experience with the popular public clouds such as AWS and Azure.
• In-depth knowledge of various database technology including relational databases, realtime databases and NoSQL databases.
• Experience developing for and managing Kubernetes clusters
• Experience creating automated software development build pipelines
• In-depth knowledge with various techniques and tools for implementing and supporting infrastructure-as-code and automations such as Ansible, Terraform and Chef

Method of Application