Our client in the telecommunications sector is recruiting for the position of Systems Architect. As part of the Architecture Team you will be responsible for establishing a reference architecture for deployment of mobile money solutions working closely with the Commercial Team to understand business drivers. You will also work with the Group Technology, Security and Operations teams to ensure alignment with company standards and policies. You will propose new architecture using approved design patterns or working to agree on architectural approaches with multiple parties for new business propositions.
The agile SAFe Framework has been adopted across the company and in line with the framework you will require a systems-thinking mindset that supports the continuous flow of value through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline enabling and fostering a DevOps culture. Working closely with Agile Teams, you will help implement enablers that define, explore and evolve solutions. You will help plan and develop the Architectural Runway in support of new business Features and Capabilities by actively participating in Program Increment (PI) planning, System Demos and Inspect and Adapt (I&A) events. You will have an overarching appreciation for Agile Architecture in SAFe promoting a set of values, practices and collaborations that support the active, evolutionary design and architecture of the company’s systems.
Duties and Responsibilities:
- Defining and maintaining the target-state infrastructure architecture across data centres, cloud platforms and edge environments
- Leading the roadmap for infrastructure modernisation including virtualisation, hyperconverged systems, containerisation and network overlays
- Establishing infrastructure patterns and blueprints for compute, storage, backup, disaster recovery and network architectures
- Aligning infrastructure strategy with Enterprise Architecture principles, performance objectives and service-level agreements
- Driving hybrid and multi-cloud architecture strategy across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and private cloud platforms such as OpenStack and VMware
- Architecting secure and compliant infrastructure-as-code pipelines by integrating tools such as Terraform and Ansible
- Guiding cloud landing zone design, virtual private cloud architecture, identity federation and interconnect strategies
- Ensuring observability, cost governance and elasticity in cloud-native workloads
- Embedding security-by-design principles into infrastructure blueprints including micro-segmentation, encryption and zero-trust access
- Architecting high availability and disaster recovery solutions across critical systems to ensure geographic redundancy and failover readiness
- Ensuring infrastructure compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, ISO 27001 and local regulatory requirements
- Supporting infrastructure risk assessments and preparation for penetration testing
- Participating in Architecture Review Boards to assess infrastructure impact and alignment with strategic objectives
- Collaborating with DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Security and Operations teams to promote infrastructure reliability and automation
- Engaging with vendors, cloud providers and technology partners for capability assessment and solution development
- Producing and maintaining infrastructure architecture documentation, standards and runbooks
- Delivering infrastructure blueprints aligned to Enterprise Architecture target architecture within established timeframes
- Defining scalable deployment topologies for critical systems including mobile money platforms, application programming interfaces and microservices clusters
- Championing use of infrastructure blueprints and reusable templates to reduce configuration drift and accelerate onboarding
- Enabling at least three legacy workloads for cloud readiness through full infrastructure-as-code deployment
- Designing secure multi-cloud landing zones with federated identity, policy enforcement and network segmentation
- Developing migration playbooks and automated cutover strategies to enable safe cloud transitions
- Deploying observability and automation across at least sixty percent of critical systems
- Establishing platform service-level agreements and working with Technical Operations to monitor and improve uptime and performance
- Ensuring all infrastructure configurations comply with internal baselines and successfully pass automated security scans
- Integrating infrastructure security with Security Information and Event Management, Security Orchestration Automation and Response and vulnerability management tools in collaboration with Cybersecurity teams
Minimum Requirements:
- At least 8 years’ experience in infrastructure or cloud architecture within high-availability environments
- Strong expertise in data centre and cloud network design, compute and virtualisation, hybrid cloud, IaC, automation, CI/CD, and observability
- Skilled in platform engineering, service mesh, secure enclaves, and Kubernetes operations
- Familiar with Fintech or payments-grade infrastructure standards, zero trust, identity federation, and secure-by-design principles
- Proven ability in architecting hybrid and multi-cloud solutions (AWS, Azure, GCP), container orchestration, and IaaS/PaaS models
- Deep understanding of regulatory compliance (PCI-DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001) and integrating security protocols (OAuth2, OpenID, SAML)
- Experience in risk assessments, threat modelling, and cloud-native services such as serverless and orchestration
- Has led or supported large-scale transformation programmes, such as core banking and ERP overhauls
- Well-versed in observability tools (Datadog, Splunk), edge computing, CDN integration, and mobile backend scaling
- Holds cloud certifications (e.g. AWS or Azure Architect)
- Experience in release automation and continuous delivery practices
- Experience in vendor assessments and technical due diligence for platform selections
- Demonstrates knowledge of leading payments technologies and innovations
- Ability to translate technical and architectural policy into detailed design