M-Pesa Africa: Senior Data Architect

Role Overview

This role owns the enterprise data architecture for M-PESA Africa across multiple markets, covering transactional, operational, analytical, and AI/ML data domains. Day to day, you will define how data is modeled, integrated, governed, and consumed across real-time and batch pipelines, ensuring that payment rails, fraud detection, regulatory reporting, and AI initiatives have a reliable, scalable foundation. Your work directly enables M-PESA to operate efficiently, comply with local and cross-border regulations, and unlock value from data through advanced analytics and machine learning.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end data architecture blueprint for M-PESA Africa’s multi-country operations, spanning transactional, operational, analytical, and AI/ML data domains, and set the strategic direction for data modeling, storage, movement, and consumption.
• Define and enforce data modeling standards, data flow patterns, and integration architecture for both real-time and batch processing, ensuring consistency and scalability across all six markets.
• Lead the design of data platforms that support payment rails, API analytics, fraud and AML detection, and regulatory reporting, while driving adoption of modern architectures such as data mesh, data lakehouse, and event-driven patterns aligned with cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategies.
• Establish enterprise-wide data governance, data quality, and master data management (MDM) frameworks, including data classification, lineage, and cataloging standards that provide traceability from source systems (e.g., Fintech 2.0 Platform) through to consumption layers.
• Partner with Compliance, Legal, and market teams to ensure data architectures meet local regulatory obligations and cross-border data sovereignty requirements.
• Architect integration patterns between M-PESA core systems, third-party platforms, and analytics/AI layers, including event-driven, API-first data exchange, and govern streaming and change data capture (CDC)