Head, Business Technology at Interswitch Group

Interswitch is an Africa-focused integrated digital payments and commerce company that facilitates the electronic circulation of money as well as the exchange of value between individuals and organisations on a timely and consistent basis. We started operations in 2002 as a transaction switching and electronic payments processing, and have progressively evolved into an integrated payment services company, building and managing payment infrastructure as well as delivering innovative payment products and transactional services throughout the African continent. At Interswitch, we offer unique career opportunities for individuals capable of playing key roles and adding value in an innovative and fun environment.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Head, Business Technology

Location: Lagos
Employment Type: Full-time

Job Summary

• The ideal candidate will be responsible for setting direction and promoting continuous evolution of Operations and Technology Internal Backoffice Applications, including function upgrade, architecture refresh and eco-system integration.
• He/she will directly oversee the software development team including Software Engineers, QA Engineers and DevOps Engineers while working closely with product leaders and business leaders to define the product and ensure it addresses the needs of the organisation and customers, by providing support to the operations and support leadership.
• The Head, Business Technology will help deliver purpose-built solutions that must achieve world-class scalability and availability for our customers, while allowing us the flexibility to innovate at top speed.

Job Responsibilities
Strategy & Planning:

• Be accountable for aligning the business's strategic vision with its software technology.
• Lead the business-wide technical and business discussions relative to future enterprise platform design direction.
• Be responsible for the development of software and data delivery platforms that are service-oriented with reusable components that can be orchestrated together into different methods for different businesses and modalities.
• Approach the role from an analytics and machine learning perspective and not be afraid to disrupt the status quo and take risks.
• Define and build engineering development platform processes which enhance engineering consistency and efficiency of engineering development practices.
• Be a culture change agent who has lived with the most modern practices and seeks them out.
• Define principles that guide technology decisions and the relationships between enterprise business context (industry and market trends) and specified technology.
• Lead the development of modern software development tools and techniques and open source environment.
• Partner with internal and external stakeholders/resources to ensure cyber-security readiness.
• Develop and drive a technical community across the organization that fosters innovation, agile design and test methodology, flexible teaming, knowledge sharing and talent transformation.
• Provide leadership, inspiration and guidance to a growing team; foster a culture of transparency, collaboration and innovation.
• Develop and communicate business/technology alignment plans to executive team, staff, partners, customers, and stakeholders.
• Ensuring that portfolio selection takes into account technical issues, shaping it in line with architecture and in turn using business priorities to shape architectural choices.

Acquisition & Deployment:

• Cultivates a culture that proactively uses market data to drive growth.
• Works with senior business leadership to approve allocation of budget to meet architectural initiatives critical to business/mission success.
• Ensures enterprise-wide on-time delivery and architectural alignment with project goals and requirements.
• Defines strategy with senior business leaders and subject matter authorities and determines courses of action that will impact the business.
• Makes timely decisions that set enterprise-wide direction. Promotes a tolerance for high long-term risk that equates with significant returns on the investment.
• Thinks expansively by combining ideas in unique ways or making connections between disparate ideas.
• Understands the business strategy and interconnects the overall business, software, internal and external strategies.
• Ability to set/change direction at the enterprise level by building and using direct and "behind the scenes" support for ideas, uses chains of indirect influence.

Operational Management:

• Continually monitors industry dynamics and market trends and anticipates how those trends will impact business division and our customers' profitability.
• Reviews and/or analyses and develops architectural requirements, as needed for business-wide projects.
• Set technology direction by applying in-depth technical know-how to achieve business objectives.
• Lead the research, prototyping and productization of new concepts within the research and development team.
• Be part of the core team to build and promote the product roadmap.
• Communicate the technical vision with the development team and ensure top-quality execution across all teams.
• Analyze and improve the software quality, including scalability, stability, and security.
• Provide proof-of-concept, yet production-grade code prototypes that set examples to the broader team regarding new technologies or design patterns.
• Where necessary, oversee and develop patenting of intellectual property, inventions, and business processes.
• Proactively identifies reuse goals, opportunities, and related explorations.
• Periodically review code and direct systematic enhancements
• Stay up to date with software technologies and solutions to ensure proper toolsets serve business division presently and into the future.
• Ensuring, and embodying, the principles of agility, DevOps, and agility-at-scale at the organizational level – promoting the evolution of working practices, operating models and ways of working.

Educational Qualification(s) and Certification

• University Degree in the field of Computer Science or "STEM" major (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) or related field.

Experience:

• A minimum of 10 years of technical experience along with 4 years of experience leading multi-discipline technical teams with international reach across multiple service types, ideally in payment and software engineering environments.
• A minimum of 4 years as a software architect, especially for a large and complex software project.
• A minimum 2 years’ experience delivering data and analytics solutions which address internal/external customer challenges, including architecting as-a-service models.
• Experience in the development and deployment of modern machine learning, as well as experience driving and executing cloud and digital technology strategies would be an added advantage.
• Experience building and supporting complex, high-concurrency SaaS products, from the lead developer or architect role.
• Deep understanding and direct knowledge on software scalability and stability technique for Windows and Linux-based software
• In-depth knowledge of various database technology including relational databases, real-time databases, and NoSQL databases.
• In-depth knowledge with various coding languages such as C++, Java, .Net, JavaScript, Go and Python.
• Experience with big data, machine learning, software-defined network and infrastructure is a plus.

Application Closing Date
Not Specified.

Method of Application
Interested and qualified candidates should:
Click here to apply online