M-Pesa Africa: Senior Data Architect

Job Description We are Africa’s largest fintech providing financial services to more than 60 million customers and 5 million businesses, with transactions of over $1.2 billion a day across 8 countries. Driven by a strong passion in innovation, we provide Africa’s leading super app, the M-PESA Super App, pioneering a digital financial ecosystem that empowers customers and businesses to send and receive money and payments across the world, enables them with access to affordable credit and savings propositions, and provides them with best-in-class solutions to easily grow their wealth and businesses. United in our purpose to Transform Lives, we are determined and energetic in exploring and delivering solutions that consistently address our customers’ needs as we believe that we can only succeed if our customers and the community around us are succeeding. M-PESA Africa is looking for a Senior Data Architect to design, govern, and evolve our enterprise data landscape across our markets. Operating at the intersection of mobile money, payments infrastructure, AI, and analytics, you will set the architectural standards and strategic direction for how data flows, is governed, and generates value across M-PESA's platforms. This is a senior individual contributor role with broad influence across engineering, product, compliance, and group-level stakeholders. You will be expected to lead with vision, mentor others, and translate complex data challenges into scalable architectural solutions. Responsibilities Data Architecture & Strategy Own the enterprise data architecture across M-PESA Africa's multi-market environment, spanning transactional, operational, analytical, and AI/ML data domains. Define and enforce data modelling standards, data flow patterns, and integration architecture for real-time and batch processing pipelines. Lead architecture design for data platforms supporting payment rails, API analytics, fraud and AML detection, and regulatory reporting. Drive the transition to modern data architectures: data mesh, data lakehouse, event-driven patterns aligning to M-PESA's cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategy. Data Governance & Standards Establish and champion enterprise-wide data governance frameworks, data quality standards, and master data management (MDM) policies across all six markets. Define data classification, lineage, and cataloguing standards, ensuring 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. Integration & Platform Architecture Architect data integration patterns between M-PESA core systems, third-party platforms and analytics/AI layers. Collaborate with API gateway teams to define event-driven, API-first data exchange patterns aligned with the integration layer strategy. Design and govern streaming and CDC pipelines using tech