ABOUT CELLULANT:
Cellulant is Africa’s leading payments company, providing seamless, secure and innovative solutions that empower businesses, banks, and global brands to thrive in a fast-changing global economy.
With a presence in over 24 countries and 200+ payment methods across cards, bank transfer and mobile money, our single API payment platform, Tingg, simplifies collections, disbursements, and reconciliations. It processes over 1 million transactions daily for market leaders in various sectors, such as Airlines, Telecoms, E-commerce, Ride-Hailing, Retail, and Remittances. By simplifying how people pay and get paid, we drive trust, commerce and scale – and connect companies to their ambitions.
Our Story:
Across Africa, payments are more than transactions. They are gateways to prosperity, connecting people, businesses and communities to opportunities and growth.
From enabling a logistics company in Lusaka to pay suppliers across borders, to enabling a hospitality brand in Lagos to scale effortlessly, to supporting an airline in Nairobi to reconcile payments from multiple platforms, Cellulant is the bridge that makes it all possible.
Through trusted technology and customer-centric innovation, we build connections that inspire progress, strengthen economies and transform payments into a tool for progress.
Since our founding in 2003, we've continuously adapted and grown, leveraging our experiences to simplify payments for businesses. We are driven by an unshakable belief that seamless people-centred payments are the key to unlocking prosperity.
Today, Cellulant powers online and offline payment processing, allowing businesses to collect payments, send payouts, and accelerate business growth.
Our Mission:
To deliver seamless, secure and innovative payment solutions for businesses.
Our Vision:
To create a connected world where businesses move money as easily as they share ideas.
JOB DESCRIPTION:
Role Overview:
As the Cloud Engineering Manager in the Platform Engineering Department, you will lead and grow the Cloud & Infrastructure team while serving as the technical authority for Cellulant’s hybrid and multi-cloud platforms.
This role combines hands-on expertise in cloud engineering and architecture with people management, leadership, and strategic execution. You will set the direction for Cellulant’s cloud and on-prem platforms, drive operational excellence, and ensure that our infrastructure meets the highest standards of scalability, security, and cost efficiency expected in the FinTech industry.
Your key relationship and stakeholders across the business are:
Reports to: Head of Platform Engineering
Key relationship and stakeholders:
- Software Engineering Teams
- Release Engineering / CI-CD Teams
- Database Administration (DBA) Team
- Networks & Infrastructure Teams
- Security & Compliance Teams
- Service Operations Team
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES:
As Cloud Engineering Manager, you will:
- Lead & Develop the Cloud Engineering Team: Manage, mentor, and grow a team of cloud and infrastructure engineers. Build a high-performance culture that emphasizes technical excellence, automation, and resilience.
- Set & Drive Cloud Strategy: Define and execute the long-term vision for multi-cloud and hybrid platforms (public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises), ensuring scalability, sustainability, and alignment with business goals.
- Architect High-Availability & DR Solutions: Oversee the design and delivery of resilient, fault-tolerant infrastructure with multi-region or multi-cloud failover, disaster recovery (DR), and self-healing capabilities.
- Champion Cloud-Native Operations: Lead adoption of container orchestration, service meshes, serverless, and autoscaling frameworks (e.g., Kubernetes, Karpenter, KEDA) to deliver modern, cloud-native platforms.
- Own Cost & Efficiency Outcomes: Lead cloud financial operations (FinOps), driving cost optimization, workload placement decisions, reserved/savings plan strategies, and sustainable infrastructure practices.
- Ensure Security & Compliance: Oversee secure design and operation of platforms, embedding zero-trust architectures, encryption, IAM, secrets management, and adherence to regulatory frameworks (PCI DSS, SOC 2, GDPR, BoT).
- Partner Across Teams: Collaborate with product engineering, release engineering, DBA, networks, and security teams to ensure reliable and efficient delivery of infrastructure services.
- Drive Observability & SRE Practices: Ensure comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing across platforms, and enforce SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs to guarantee reliability.
- Evaluate & Adopt Emerging Tech: Lead assessments of new technologies (serverless, AIOps, cloud-native security, automation frameworks) to improve efficiency, resilience, and developer velocity.
- Define Standards & Governance: Establish and enforce engineering best practices, architectural standards, documentation (LLD, FRD, runbooks), and governance models.
- Stakeholder Management: Serve as the key point of contact for leadership on cloud initiatives, providing updates on strategy, execution, risks, and cost performance.
Must have experience:
- 10+ years in Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering, with at least 3–5 years in a leadership or management role.
- Proven leadership in hybrid & multi-cloud environments (AWS primary, with exposure to GCP and Azure).
- Hands-on expertise in AWS services (EKS, EC2, RDS/Aurora, S3, VPC, IAM, Route 53, CloudWatch, Savings Plans).
- Advanced knowledge of Kubernetes (EKS, on-prem clusters with Flannel/Calico, Rancher, Karpenter, KEDA).
- Strong networking expertise (BGP, VXLAN, VPNs, DNS, load balancing, firewalls including Fortigate).
- Experience in hybrid DR architectures (on-prem ↔ cloud, active-passive failover, database + Kubernetes DR).
- Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm, Ansible, CloudFormation).
- Proven track record of cost optimization and FinOps governance in large-scale cloud environments.
- Deep experience with observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Fluentd).
- Strong security mindset with hands-on experience in IAM, secrets management (Doppler, HashiCorp Vault), compliance frameworks (PCI DSS, SOC2, GDPR, BoT).
- Excellent troubleshooting, debugging, and performance optimization skills in Linux (RHEL, Rocky, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu) environments.
Experience that will count in your favour:
- Experience leading cloud-to-on-prem migrations or data center consolidations.
- Familiarity with GitOps, service meshes, and advanced cloud automation.
- Hands-on with observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana).
- Strong background in compliance and audit readiness (PCI DSS, GDPR, SOC2).
- Prior experience in payments, banking, or other highly regulated industries.
Nice to have experience:
- Experience with AI/ML-driven cloud operations (predictive scaling, anomaly detection, automated remediation).
- Exposure to container-native storage (Ceph, Longhorn, Portworx).
- Experience with cloud sustainability practices (green computing, energy-efficient architectures).
Qualification:
- Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in an IT or Engineering related discipline
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
- AWS Solutions Architect – Professional.
- Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKS/CKAD) highly desirable
- Additional certifications in GCP, Azure, or security (CISSP, CISM, CCSP) will be an advantage.
Skills:
- Enterprise-grade cloud & infrastructure architecture.
- Kubernetes & container orchestration expertise.
- Networking, firewalls, and security in hybrid environments.
- Infrastructure as Code automation (Terraform, Ansible, Helm).
- Observability & monitoring at scale (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana).
- Cost optimization & FinOps strategy for multi-cloud.
- Disaster recovery & high availability design.
- Strong scripting and automation (Bash, Python, Go preferred)
- Stakeholder management and cross-team leadership.
- Documentation and governance frameworks (LLD, FRD, Business Case).
Personal attributes:
- Visionary leadership with the courage to drive change across cloud and infrastructure.
- Customer-first mindset with an obsession for reliability and availability in payments.
- Collaborative and inclusive, able to unite engineering, operations, and business teams.
- Structured and strategic thinker with the ability to balance innovation, cost, and compliance.
- High energy and resilience, thriving in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment.
- Technically excellent and detail-oriented, setting the bar for engineering standards.
- Mentorship-driven, with a passion for growing technical talent across teams.
Why Work for Us?
At Cellulant, we are more than a payments company: we are bridge-builders. We believe that by simplifying the way people pay and get paid, we are connecting companies to their ambitions, people to opportunities, and Africa to the global economy. Our work goes beyond payments—it’s about what people, businesses, and communities can do when the movement of money becomes more dependable, seamless, and secure.
Some exciting things about us...
- We have an extensive footprint: We have an office presence in 10 countries, and our products serve 24 countries across Africa, with a global workforce of about 300 employees.
- We believe innovation is at the heart of Fintech: Thousands of market leaders and top enterprises trust our technology to power their payments. Our customers are in various sectors, including financial services, travel and hospitality, telecom, e-commerce, remittance companies, SaaS, and the gig economy.
- We support a diverse and inclusive workforce: We focus on the growth and development of our employees through well-developed, individualised career paths, ensuring you reach your full potential in a supportive and delivery-oriented environment.
- We put our employees first: At Cellulant, your contribution is rewarded competitively. We use clear career levels and role titles, and benchmark our base pay against data and a well-established internal process. Your actual salary will reflect your experience, skills, impact and the scope of the role, as well as our business needs and prevailing market conditions. We also offer generous personal time off, and medical and life insurance benefits (markets permitting).
- We seek collaborative builders: At Cellulant, we believe that great ideas happen when we come together. Therefore, we nurture a collaborative work environment that challenges, engages, and empowers each person to contribute to the growth and success of the business.
- We solve Africa's digital economy: We’re solving payment challenges on the continent to create opportunities and accelerate economic growth for all of Africa.
