Head of Infrastructure and Security Operation at Sparkle Nigeria

About the Role:

• The Head of Infrastructure and Security Operations will lead the Technology team and enhancement of
• Sparkle's operational technology systems, including the Core Banking, Infrastructure, Security, and Technical Services teams. The Ideal candidate should have prior experience in a senior technical leadership capacity, with deep expertise in ensuring information assets and technologies are adequately protected and risks are mitigated with appropriate safeguards. This will enable Sparkle to deliver its services successfully and securely.
• As our company is growing at a very fast pace, the ideal candidate should have experience in sourcing and hiring, as well as the ability to structure technology teams. This role requires someone who has deep knowledge of application lifecycles, databases, and services and is able to introduce processes and systems to help scale our technology infrastructure.

What you get to do every day

Strategy

• Overall responsibility for all technology activities across the business.
• Working closely with senior stakeholders to understand business requirements and help translate these into technical requirements for the Technology team.
• Owns all initiatives to develop and scale Sparkle’s Technology Strategy, Infrastructure, and Core Banking Solution
• Responsible for creating the technology vision and strategy for Sparkle as well as the policies, processes and procedures.
• Evaluate the technology challenges faced by the business and take action to mitigate risks and develop opportunities.
• Contributes to overall business strategy and annual budget process.
• Takes ownership of the technology policy, guidelines, procedure manuals and any associated documents

People Management

• Being a technical mentor - Manage and review the technical contribution of the Support and Infrastructure team.
• Leading and building the support and infrastructure team which comprises DevOps engineers, Application Support Engineers, Cloud Architect, and DevSecOps Engineer.
• Work closely with the People & Culture team in hiring engineers including preparing job descriptions, identifying skillsets, developing hiring tests, and participating in interviews.
• Educate and mentor team members on best practices.

Risk Management & Security

• Ensure risks are adequately assessed, analyzed, mitigated, and properly escalated within all engineering activities and projects.
• Ensure project adhere to all relevant pre-agree/prequalifying risk, compliance, regulatory, and/or quality control standards or requirements such as the CBN Cybersecurity framework.
• Ensure all tasks, processes and projects are compliant with risk management, information security, compliance and business resilience standards, policies and requirements communicated and/or established from time to time
• Keep abreast with industry and global best practices for risk management, information security, regulatory compliance and business resilience and implement same at sparkle as applicable

Product Development

• Defining a technology road map with organisation & business goals envisioning the tech stack required to scale the business with a long-term technology vision.
• Responsible for managing Sparkle’s product back-end, front-end, infrastructure, architecture and scalability.
• Works closely with the business and engineering teams on issues related to design, infrastructure and support requirements.
• Leads the Technology team contribution to building high-quality products within Sparkle.
• Ensures that all Tech team members are aware of and adhere to the quality standards in organization, what value they bring in and encourage them to make the standards even better.
• Understanding business needs for defining engineering and product-building requirements
• Provides inputs, estimates and plans for product and feature development.
• Setting and managing expectations for infrastructure & support requirements
• Monitoring and supporting apps and handle issues that get escalated.
• Be ready to get your hands dirty with actual coding as and when needed, we expect you to spend 40% time doing hands on technical work and test 60% on management activities.

Process Management

• Establish and stimulate Tech infrastructure, support, and resilience standards and processes along with best practices for delivery of scalable and high-quality tech services and infrastructure.
• Develop deep and strong understanding the technologies, tools, and techniques used within the team.
• Championing best technology delivery practices like design, code reviews etc.

Project Management

• Ensure requests specifications and project requirements are clearly relayed and understood by Technology teams.
• Ensure tech and infrastructure teams deliver on project specifications and requirements.
• Ensure projects are kept on Schedule to meet deadlines.
• Ensure technical specifications and requirements for features and system design are properly planned and documented for the teams (specific reference to the implementation of the Sparkle IT Health Check recommendations)

About You:

Leadership Competencies (Based on Sparkle’s Bite Competencies for this Level)

Building Capabilities

• Experience: This role also requires at least 5 years of experience managing infrastructure teams with a background in working in the finance and banking industry with solid industry knowledge.
• Business Acumen: You lead architectural system designs on the most complex systems and demonstrate a high level of product awareness for areas of the business you are working with. You understand the importance of product-market fit and work closely with product leadership to ensure we're making the right decisions across teams within the engineering department. You proactively identify problems that challenge our scale or business direction.
• Systems Improvements: You have a proven track record of implementing significant improvements in quality, performance, stability and scalability to codes across all teams within your department. You foster a culture of quality within teams and the engineering department as a whole.
• Context: You proactively identify problems that challenge our scale or business direction. You understand and coach everyone in your team to understand the context of multiple different work streams and offer effective technical advice and support for those workstreams while still maintaining excellent velocity.

 Impact

• Business outcomes: You meaningfully contribute to achieving company and collective goals and directly increase the company’s value over time. You are widely considered an expert in one or more engineering areas by their peers and company leadership.
• Influence within Sparkle: You are actively sought out by others for contributions to our most pressing and highest-priority business challenges because they’re known to be effective. You lead large, strategic, complex engineering projects - often crossing different engineering areas. Drives architecture and systems design across multiple teams within your department. Regularly and positively influences the direction of systems design across the company.
• Proactivity: Comfortably leads to the resolution of any engineering problem related to their discipline, whether they have experienced it or not.

Teamwork & Collaboration

• Mentorship & knowledge sharing: Proactively sponsors, mentors, and helps to level up more senior engineers.
• People Leadership: Facilitates performance management in your area of responsibility, including providing regular, specific, actionable feedback and guidance on performance and personal/career development.
• Collaboration: You will collaborate with disciplines, teams, and leaders across the entire company to make Sparkle more than a sum of its parts. Your collaborative nature is that of a maestro/a who helps bring out the best in your colleagues' work. You make people want to work with you because when they do, they feel valued and understand how their contributions make Sparkle better.

Execution

• Communication: You understand and coach everyone in your team to understand the context of multiple different work streams and offer effective technical advice and support for those workstreams while still maintaining excellent velocity. You are able to proactively propose strategy for engineering within their Collective/Discipline and know how to effectively get buy-in and move this forward.
• Emotional Intelligence: Remains calm during incidents or critical company emergencies. Can influence and lead others to bring structure and clarity rather than chaos.
• Prioritization & scope management: You proactively reach beyond your department to influence priorities and scope across technology. You regularly challenge your team or area to have a greater sense of urgency for company priorities.