Group Head of Infrastructure

The Head of Infrastructure will provide strategic leadership and operational oversight for Onafriq’s group-wide infrastructure teams, ensuring robust, scalable, and secure platforms across Cards, Enterprise, Network, and Agency domains. This is a high-impact leadership role for a candidate who can combine deep technical expertise with strong operational judgment and people's leadership. The successful candidate will help shape the backbone of a pan-African payments network, drive cloud and platform modernization, improve resilience and observability, and ensure infrastructure remains secure, compliant, and ready to support continued growth across multiple markets.

This position is location-agnostic.

You will be a good fit if you:

• Visionary thinker with hands-on technical depth.
• Proven ability to manage complex, global infrastructure projects.
• Strong interpersonal skills, with a focus on building collaborative relationships.
• Passion for technological innovation and operational excellence.
• High attention to detail

Strategic Leadership & Vision

• Define and deliver a group of infrastructure roadmap that directly supports Onafriq’s growth, reliability, security, and market expansion objectives.
• Translate business priorities into clear infrastructure outcomes, investment choices, delivery plans, and measurable service improvements.
• Provide executive-level visibility on infrastructure health, risks, trade-offs, and decisions required to maintain platform resilience at scale.
• Cloud Infrastructure & Systems Administration
• Deliver secure, scalable, and cost-effective cloud and hybrid infrastructure capable of supporting high-volume payments and enterprise workloads.
• Improve infrastructure automation, monitoring, observability, and recovery capabilities to reduce manual effort and accelerate issue detection and resolution.
• Maintain strong uptime, performance, patching, backup, and capacity management standards across critical systems and environments.

Payments & Financial Systems

• Ensure infrastructure consistently supports secure, compliant, and highly available payment services across cards, enterprise, network, and agency platforms.
• Partner with Product, Operations, Security, and Engineering teams to remove infrastructure bottlenecks and enable faster delivery of customer and market-facing capabilities.

Operational Excellence & Security

• Reduce operational risk by strengthening incident, problem, change, release, and post-incident review processes across infrastructure teams.
• Maintain strong infrastructure security and compliance posture, including vulnerability remediation, access controls, audit readiness, PCI DSS, and related standards.
• Drive disciplined infrastructure cost management, capacity planning, and vendor optimization without compromising resilience, security, or service quality.

Team Development & Performance

• Build accountable, high-performing infrastructure teams with clear ownership, operating rhythms, escalation paths, and development plans.
• Establish measurable team objectives and service-level indicators that connect individual performance to platform reliability, delivery quality, and business outcomes.
• Innovation & Continuous Improvement
• Identify and deliver modernization opportunities that improve resilience, security, scalability, deployment speed, and operational efficiency.
• Reduce infrastructure complexity and technical debt through practical architecture improvements, standardization, automation, and lifecycle management.

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field.
• 10+ years of experience in senior infrastructure leadership roles, preferably in fintech or payments.
• Advanced certifications in cloud computing (AWS, Azure, GCP), ITIL, and security standards (PCI DSS, ISO/IEC 27001).
• Proven expertise in cloud architecture, system administration, and payment systems infrastructure.
• Strong experience in leading distributed teams and managing complex, cross-functional projects.
• Exceptional leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills.