The O&M Team Lead Senior Manager role is accountable for the stability, availability, and security of the core platform and all its integrations. This position combines strategic leadership with hands-on technical expertise, necessitating ownership of the OPEX budget, driving the 1-5-10 operational mandate, and building a Center of Excellence that standardizes operational practices across the region. Working closely with delivery teams, vendors, and integration partners, the Senior Manager ensures operational readiness for all production deployments, leads the transformation from reactive to automated code-driven operations (SRE), and expertly balances change velocity with platform stability in a high-demand environment. The key driver for this role is to achieve world-class operational excellence through strategic direction-setting, building organizational capability, and maintaining ultimate accountability for service delivery across technical operations staff managing multiple systems.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Operations & Reliability Excellence
- High-Velocity Incident Management (The 1-5-10 Mandate): Establish the strategic vision and framework for achieving the "1-5-10" operational mandate (1 minute detection, 5 minutes investigation, 10 minutes remediation) across all DFS Technical Operations teams, targeting implementation by Q4 2026. Define success metrics and monitoring frameworks, and provide hands-on technical leadership during critical, high-impact incidents.
- SRE & Automation Transformation: Drive strategic transformation from reactive, manual operations to proactive, automated, code-driven practices across the core platform and integrations. Champion investment in self-healing infrastructure and intelligent automation, setting technical direction and allocating OPEX budget strategically for high-impact automation solutions.
- Platform Stability & Availability Leadership: Own ultimate accountability for world-class availability, performance, and security of the core platform and integrations across a regional footprint. Establish platform-wide observability standards and step into critical technical decisions during major incidents.
Service Management & Governance
- Service Lifecycle Strategy & Oversight: Define the strategic approach to Service Management across Incident, Problem, Change, and technical debt elimination, establishing platform-wide SLA/OLA frameworks.
- Operational & Production Deployment Readiness: Own the strategic framework for operational readiness, establishing and evolving operational acceptance criteria and certification standards. Provide final approval for high-risk deployments.
- Change Advisory & Enterprise Risk Management: Provide senior advisory input and final approval for all changes. Assess enterprise-level change risk, coordinating planning with peer Senior Managers (Configurations, Delivery) to prevent conflicts.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Conduct regular executive briefings on platform health, risk landscape, and operational performance. Represent Technical Operations in executive forums.
- Technical Asset & Lifecycle Management: Establish enterprise-wide standards for asset inventory and technical currency. Ensure 100% adherence to regional financial regulations, data residency laws, and security standards. Define and oversee BC/DR strategic approaches and testing programs.
Vendor & Financial Management
- Vendor & Integration Partner Leadership: Own strategic vendor relationships, conduct service reviews, drive value optimization, and lead discussions on dependency reduction and build-vs-buy decisions. Approve contracts, renewals, and commercial terms.
- Financial Management & Cost Optimization: Develop, manage, and optimize the complete OPEX budget for Technical Operations. Identify strategic cost optimization opportunities through operational efficiency and vendor rationalization.
Center of Excellence, Leadership, and Innovation
- Center of Excellence & Standardization: Build and lead the Technical Operations CoE, driving the standardization of operational procedures, tooling, monitoring frameworks, and runbooks across subsidiaries. Ensure operational consistency during platform rollouts.
- Cross-Functional Leadership & Collaboration: Maintain tight collaboration with DFS Configurations and Delivery leadership, ensuring seamless build-to-run handoffs and coordinated deployment planning.
- People Leadership & Organizational Development: Lead and mentor two direct report Managers (Core Platform and Integrations), setting clear expectations, KPIs, and strategic objectives. Drive talent strategy, career pathways, and cultural alignment.
- Continuous Improvement & Innovation: Champion continuous improvement and innovation initiatives to enhance operational efficiency, reduce toil, and sponsor proof-of-concept projects for emerging technologies.
Qualifications
Experience Requirements
- Technical Operations Leadership: Minimum 8–10 years of progressive experience in technical operations, production support or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), with at least 3–5 years in leadership roles managing teams in mission-critical 24/7 environments.
- Financial Services/Mobile Money Platform Operations: Minimum 5–7 years operating financial services platforms, core banking systems, payment processing, or mobile money platforms, with a proven track record of maintaining high availability and managing operations in regulated environments with compliance requirements.
- Multi-Country Operations Management: Demonstrated experience managing technical operations across multiple locations, countries or business units.
- Change Leadership: Proven track record leading operational improvements such as automation initiatives, process standardization, SRE practices adoption or service management framework implementation.
- Vendor & Partner Ecosystem Management: Strong experience managing relationships with application vendors, integration partners or third-party service providers, including vendor performance management and multi-party incident coordination.
- Cross-Functional Leadership: Demonstrated ability collaborating with peer leaders across delivery, infrastructure, security and business units.
- Budget & Cost Management: Experience managing operational budgets, identifying cost optimization opportunities and participating in vendor negotiations.
- Incident & Crisis Management at Scale: Extensive hands-on experience leading major incident response for business-critical systems, coordinating response across multiple teams and vendors.
Academic Qualifications
- University degree (BA/BSc/HND) in Information Technology, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
- Relevant professional certifications such as ITIL Foundation or higher, AWS/Azure/GCP certifications or equivalent.
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