Reporting to Delivery & Support Lead, Channels IT, the Channels Planning and SRE Engineer will be responsible for ensuring system availability, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, security, and capacity planning of Safaricom digital channels platforms.  The role focuses on operational excellence, operational support, system uptime and availability of our digital channels. They combine analytical skills, critical thinking, technical expertise, and domain knowledge to create compelling digital experiences that meet user needs and support organizational objective.

Key Responsibilities

Digital Channels Applications’ Stability 

• Ensuring operational excellence through proactively maintaining, supporting, developing and implementing services including end to end monitoring scripting and automation, modern tooling, and maintenance of platforms.
• Ensuring systems stability and uptime on all digital channels applications’ meeting the key performance metrics.
• Problem and Incident management – ensure level 2 &3 support and incidents are addressed within SLA.
• Define measure, monitor, and report key systems reliability performance indicators and escalate breaches and violation with an eye towards pushing our capabilities forward, getting ahead of customer needs and innovating continuously to improve.
• Pro-active monitoring of all Channels IT Applications and service logs, troubleshooting and responding to escalations raised by system users (internal and external customers).
• Pro-active monitoring and identification of performance bottlenecks and issues affecting applications and services using AI Tools.

Channel Development and Enhancement

• Development, enhancement, and optimization of channels applications, including websites, mobile applications, portals, social media platforms, chatbots, and other digital touchpoints.
• Driving continuous improvement of the applications through chaos experiments, automation, ML/AIOPS and proactive alerting strategies.
• Execute deployment of new features, applications, and version upgrades as per the change management policy.

Channels System Planning

• Deployment of software patches to platforms and applications within channels after proper identification, documentation and testing.
• Maintaining of all Apps, Portals and Chatbots within the channels domain at version n-1 by planning and conducting timely version upgrades.
• Capacity planning and management by the assessment of current and future resource needs while maintaining service levels.
• Quarterly BCP planning and execution on all platforms within the Channels ecosystem.
• Identification, assessment and mitigation of security risks and system vulnerabilities by ensuring best practice security management

BCP Practices Management & Execution

• Plan, Execute Channels IT BCP and Disaster Recovery Plan as per schedule to ensure that all potential risks and gaps are closed, and the platforms have complied to Enterprise Risk Policies.

Compliance and Security

• Ensure channels IT Applications comply with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards related to data privacy, security, accessibility, and digital rights management.
• Adhere to Data Protection Act and Safaricom Code of Ethics for Employees with Privileged Access regarding all Data.
• Implement measures to protect user data, secure transactions, and mitigate cybersecurity risks.

Continuous Improvement and Innovation

• Stay abreast of emerging trends, technologies, and best practices in ensuring No-Ops technology platforms.
• Develop and implement Operational Bots for all repetitive support tasks using predictive maintenance methodologies and approaches.
• Explore opportunities for innovation, experiment with new tools and techniques, and lead initiatives to drive continuous improvement and innovation in delivery.
• Continuously improve skills and competencies by proactively participating in various internal and external training opportunities and stretch assignments.

Monitoring Platforms and Key Processes

• Monitoring of key domain specific processes to ensure the desired business outcome is achieved.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering/technology/computer science or relevant field along with technical qualifications, or equivalent qualification(s).
• 2 years’ experience in a busy IT environment or Software Engineering.
• Technical Knowledge in RPA, AI, Cloud Computing, Microservice Architectures and Programming will be an added advantage.
• Competency in system and application administration and practices preferred.
• Individual thinker with the ability to identify and drive new uncharted solutions.
• Ability and willingness to share knowledge with individuals with varying levels of experience.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Strong familiarity with web servers and load balancing technologies.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture principles.
• Experience working with Relational (RDBMS) such as MySQL, PostgreSQL etc. and Non-relational (NRDBS) Databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB etc.
• Experience in Unix/Linux/AIX Operating System and application security technologies (e.g. SSL).
• Professional experience and knowledge of the telecommunications industry preferred.