Specialist - Digital Platforms.Technology Information

Mission/ Core purpose of the Job
The Digital Platform Technology Specialist is a Technical lead who is responsible for a set of Digital Platforms that supports MTN’s Digital Products and Services. This role manages the architectural and design decisions that requires to be implemented with each initiative within the team. The Specialist is an executor as well as the subject matter expert on the deep technical details of each implementation/ initiative as per the agreed technical solution. The specialist will also control and ensure that the solution design is aligned and supported by the platform capabilities. The Specialist values simplicity and is not afraid to challenge and create awareness of technical constraints and procedures to achieve an Agile design. The Specialist  works closely with all team members to create a modular, scalable solution and or system design that addresses/incorporates the business and/or technical requirement as well as future architectural changes and designs. The Specialist will control the teams engineering practices in test driven development, continuous integration, and automated deployment. The Specialist  is a hands-on team member who actively assist and support the team to solve complex problems.

MTN digital services have become an increasingly crucial revenue generator for MTN South Africa. The purpose of this business unit (BU) is to develop platforms that will expose and leverage existing connectivity, to foster an ecosystem that will help drive local innovation.

In pursuit of a vision to lead the delivery of a bold, new digital world to its customers, and a mission to make its customers' lives a whole lot brighter, MTN digital services would like to drive the short and long-term expansion of the business unit, through focus on key areas, servicing and support the business unit, from a technical arm.

Context (Global influences, environmental / industry demands, organisational mission etc.)
Organisational Mission 
MTN is evolving from a mobile communications provider to a digital platform operator where innovation, operational and commercial excellence is critical for success. To excel today and sustain future growth, MTN must develop the required capabilities internally to provide the market and customers with EPIC experiences, products and services which fulfil the belief that everyone deserves the benefits of a modern connected life.

To this extent the Online Digital Products and Services team are responsible for creating and operating digital platforms which bring our products and services to customers in the easiest and most seamless manner in the form of contextualised and personalised experiences available anywhere and anytime.

The Online Digital Products and Services team are helping to bring about a transformational journey to infuse new capabilities, combining customer experience, data and digital technologies to MTN’s core connectivity business, emerging fintech and rich media offerings in order to digitise processes and innovate customer engagement.

There is a large focus area for creating, maintaining, and operating new Digital platforms and technologies which bring products and services to customers in the most efficient manner.  The ITD Digital Solutions team, inclusive of the Digital Technical Lead, will help to bring about this vision.

Global Influences / Environmental & Industry Demands
•    Highly dynamic and fluctuating Telecommunications industry 
•    Highly competitive market with new and established competitors 
•    Fast moving industry 
•    Legislative changes
•    Rapid pace of digitalization
•    Prevailing economic pressures affecting staff and customers 
•    Fluid complexities of customer expectations and demands

Key Performance Areas: Core, essential responsibilities / outputs of the position (KPA's)
Functional Leadership
•    Control and ensure the best implementation of the overall technological platform design to support the required Digital Product and/or Services. 
•    Guide cross functional vendor teams on technology strategy related to coding practices, continuous integration and automated deployment
•    Responsible for the detailed technical design of a platform that support the Digital Products and Services
•    Be hands on and engage in coding to help the team to develop the solution and solve all surfacing problems at hand Identifies and removes technical impediments
•    Constantly look for better ways of solving technical problems and designing the solution, not afraid of challenging the status quo
•    Owns the roadmap for implementing the jointly agreed target state architecture
•    Manages software engineering practices for higher code quality
•    Share responsibility with other Technical leads for building reusable and scalable components

Strategic input
•    Assist in providing input to the Digital Products and Services strategy 
•    Assist in Identifying key changes to the current digital systems from technological, commercial, business and consumer behaviour perspectives for input towards the larger Digital Products and Services Roadmap

Collaboration
•    Work closely with Tech Leads and developers of various teams to assess existing problems and to come up with process improvement solutions 
•    Detect upcoming bottlenecks and production issues proactively and consult teams hands-on towards improved technical solutions. 
•    Thought partner with the other technical leads in story creation and acceptance criteria, and communicate tradeoffs effectively with Designers

Planning & Delivery
•    Experience working directly for or with digital platforms and vendors in the service delivery space as well as mobile advertising in a telecommunications environment will be advantageous. The Digital tech lead will be expected to (included but not limited to):
o    Understanding the telecommunications Enterprise Architecture Framework in MTN and how the digital ecosystem and landscapes envelope and interact with each other;
o    Have a broad, system-level understanding of mobile network infrastructure;
o    API and microservices understanding and a strategy to replace legacy interfaces with the cloud-based strategy;
o    Have passion and enthusiasm for the mobile industry and have an in interest in digital services as a future of telecommunications as well as ensuring that there is a good customer experience (living the customer experience);
•    Provide input into the development of the roadmap for Digital systems to:
o    Ensure these plans are aligned with business requirements and budgetary prioritization.
o    Ensure Digital system designs are developed to achieve these plans.
•    Ensure planned Digital projects are delivered on time and communicated timeously when any deviation is found from a delivery perspective;
•    Assist with understanding utilization of Digital systems infrastructure, scalability and capabilities on both Virtual (on-prem) and cloud platforms;
•    Ensure Digital systems meet business requirements and are sufficient scaled for anticipated/ forecasted customer growth, especially during peak season such as Easter and December;
•    Provide review and input to the detailed Digital Architecture high-level design, ensuring that impact and expectations on existing systems and processes are managed;
•    Ensure knowledge transfer is maintained for new or enhanced capabilities, especially for the relevant support documentation and escalation processes that needs to be shared with the operations team, thereby minimizing downtime and queries, by ensuring that escalations and basic troubleshooting are correctly done;
•    Review and input to business requirements that are defined for each new project/ enhancement to existing products and services;
•    Monitor performance of vendor deliverables, investigate any performance and functionality issues, and ensure future designs are optimized to prevent issues found, by working with the relevant Solution Architects, business, and platform vendor teams;
•    Continually identify the following in respective areas:
o    Capacity Upgrades that are required due to Network Traffic;
o    Software Upgrades required to    ensure adherence to maintenance agreements;
o    Monitoring SLA’s for Security Vulnerability remediation on periodic scans, to prevent breach and threats to MTN SA.
o    Ensure POPI compliance on all systems that contain sensitive customer information.
o    Aspects of a system or systems, that have not been performing optimally that require changes to architecture or modernization of Architecture and supporting Api components, in line with best practices and governed periodically by Group Mandates;
o    Any physical hardware that is reaching end of life and requires replacement and/ or;
o    Monitoring increase in VM resources as dictated by performance optimization or increase in traffic and/ or;
•    In the Digital space, “Planning” and “Operational” areas need to function as a cohesive unit.  This means that ‘working’ relationships with Operational area units must include:
o    Discussing status of new/current projects;
o    Discussing system issues that may or may not require planning analysis;
o    Ensuring that Operations is involved in a project every step of the way, such that they can prepare for ATP/UAT- work and any roll-out activities;
o    Provide Operations the opportunity to provide ideas on system evolution from the perspective of maintaining platforms on a day-to-day basis;
o    Perform ATPs with Operations and vendors; and
o    Help test system functioning through the application of custom scripts;
o    Ensure periodic availability to help guide or support operational teams based on subject matter expertise and knowledge.
•    Participate in planning delivery time, code quality, and process efficiency improvement projects 
•    Execute on plan by building coding standardizations and automating processes for the larger Digital Products and Services team
•    Perform daily tasks such as environmental health checks, disk space monitoring, and environmental status reports

Stakeholders
•    Interface with internal cross functional experts to anticipate customer needs and facilitate solutions development.
•    Be seen as the technical expert on the in dept details of the Digital Products and Services 
•    Collaborate across functional teams within the Broader MTN SA team to enable the development of solutions necessary to drive the desired business outcomes for customers using Digital Products and Services.
•    Survey developers and technical members of the organization to understand their main pain points in the coding and development process
•    Liaise with Business and Programme Managers, regarding product development, timelines, and any issues, with respect to Digital systems capabilities and requirements;
•    Provide MTN Group with subject matter expertise related to Digital systems as and when called upon.
•    

Governance and Risk Management
•    Ensure compliance of all digital products and services with all regulatory, commercial and business requirements (e.g. Security, Fraud, TCF)

•    Develop and manage the implementation of functional policies, standard operating procedures and best practices that ensure operational efficiency, accuracy, security, integrity and compliance with relevant laws and regulations.
•    Manage partners and ensure all contracts are managed in line with procurement policies and standards, in order to drive compliance to set processes and procedures.
•    Ensure system documentation is sufficiently detailed and up to date to ensure business continuity and prevent over-reliance on a few individuals
•    Follow all corporate governance procedures;
•    Ensure that changes to the current environment are properly documented and tested before promoting into production.  
•    Postproduction changes should be documented and managed;
•    Support the prioritization process to drive requirements and initiatives in functional areas to ensure timeous delivery of requirements, as defined and agreed by the project managers office;
•    Support Revenue Assurance functions to understand issues and resolve any revenue issues or leakage;
•    Create visibility of changes to core systems, data, and products by informing relevant stakeholders accordingly;
•    Support assessment of Portfolio maturity on an annual basis, as required by MTN Group Strategic priorities;
•    Influence and implement aspects of data security policies and vulnerability remediation according to SLA’s defined;
•    Support the creation of critical Policies, Processes or Procedure such that Business risk is managed;
•    Manage vendor interaction through RFQ’s and verification of optimization from the deliverables quoted/ defined;
•    Ensure system documentation is sufficiently detailed and up to date to ensure business continuity in any absences.

People Leadership and Organisational Capability Building
•    Hold indirect reports accountable for the achievement of business plans and take corrective actions where necessary to ensure achievement of business objectives.
•    Instil the Cloud engineering domain knowledge within the technical support team.
•    Coach and mentor junior team members
•    Act as an ambassador and role model for the Technology by living the brand values and vital behaviours.
•    Make environment the best place to work.
•    Improve the employee engagement through the GCA/Sentimeter.
•    Participate in the attraction, development and retention of Planning and Engineering talent.
•    Assist in ensuring a culture of continuous evaluation and improvement.
•    Drive a culture of high performance, accountability and consequence management.

Financial Management
•    Building and maintaining vendor relations
•    Quarterly and monthly reporting analysis:
o    Be part of regular vendor meetings;
o    Convey problem areas to vendors and request action plans;
o    Ensuring that vendors supply quarterly reports on system health and utilization and any other items as per contract; and
o    Ensuring that assistance is provided to obtain maximum value for minimum cost from vendors.
•    Budget Requirements
o    Assist in tracking financial information such as:
    Breakdown of spend for quoted deliverables (tangible and intangible software, licenses, and hardware);
    Project costs.
•    Assistance with input on Yearly CAPEX Plans and tracking spend through the year to:
o    Ensure that team members are working together to ensure that spend is kept track of.
o    Must work with Line Management and Senior Digital Technical Lead/s to:
    Extract all Roadmap-items from team members and supply full budget requirement breakdowns each year; and
    Ensure that capitalisation targets are achieved as part of KPI’s.
•    Support in obtaining approval for digital systems equipment configurations to be ordered from suppliers including cost control and full lifecycle costing
•    Support the Senior Manager in identifying and eliminating non-contributory expenditures

Project Management 
•    Develop and drive the execution of agreed projects; 
•    Drive the implementation, tracking, monitoring and compliance of Projects;
•    Capturing of time spent against projects in terms of estimated and actual efforts;
•    Co-ordinate project reporting;
•    Risk management.

Job Requirements (Education, Experience and Competencies)
Education:
•    3+ year Degree / Diploma in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or related quantitative field
•    B.Sc Computer Science or BEng (Electronic), or related education

Experience:
•    Minimum of 3-6 years’ experience in area of specialisation
•    Experience in Continuous Integration/Delivery
•    Proficient in development languages
•    Proficient in Mobile Application development
•    Experience working in a medium to large organization 
•    Seasoned developer or technical lead with deep insight into newest technologies
and trends, Java/JVM, and nice to have experience with functional programming (Scala)
•    Experience in developing and scaling high-quality eCommerce tech platforms in cross-functional product teams
•    Experience in Agile Development, with specific to a technology lead or expert
•    Experience managing technical priorities within the Backlog
•    Experience working directly for or with digital platforms and vendors in the service delivery space as well as mobile advertising in a telecommunication environment;
•    VAS and Digital systems experience/ interaction; 
•    Solid understanding of networking and IP;
•    OSI layer understanding and drawing parallels to current applications;
•    Systems analysis and design;
•    Virtualization and cloud experience are advantageous but not essential – on the job training will be available;
•    At least 2+ years programming and analytics experience in the BI environment;
•    Good understanding of all aspects of BI and Information Management processes;
•    Project management and business optimisation experience would be advantageous;
•    Exposure to managing external vendor/supplier relationships and service level agreements;
•    Track record of self-development and improvement
•    

Technical Skills:
•    Seen as an expert within the technical components of the applications / domains / products / journeys 
•    Can make architecture and design decisions at an application and product level
•    Deep tech knowledge around platform architecture, frontend and backend frameworks and cloud; experience in coaching teams
•    Understands relationship with Product Owner, Scrum Master, Design Lead  and rest of technical team
•    Strong communication skills with ability to align the organization on complex technical decisions
•    Active coach and mentor whose goals are to grow and maximize the team’s potential
•    High energy and passionate individual who inspires teammates to reach their
maximum potential
•    Excited about trying new solutions outside standard approved
•    Embraces a culture of trust, free thought complete transparency
•    Brave and rebellious, willing to challenge status quo
•    Strong communication skills with ability to communicate complex technical concepts and align organization on decisions
•    Sound problem-solving skills with the ability to quickly process complex information and present it clearly and simply
•    Utilizes team collaboration to create innovative solutions efficiently
•    Basic scripting skills in any/ all the following: -- Perl, Python, SQL, Linux/Unix Shells, Office 365;
•    Good database skills (SQL in particular) – Oracle preferable, but others such as MySQL are fine;
•    Unix Scripting;
•    Good document writing skills with the ability to map out user stories, used cases in a detailed, yet clear and concise manner in the context of doing Systems Analysis and design;
•    Good record keeping skills with the ability to clearly map out System Procedures in a detailed, yet clear and concise manner;
•    Advantageous – Understanding of SS7, SIGTRAN, SIP;
•    Some working knowledge of hardware and concepts such as EOL, EOS;
•    Advanced Analytics and working with Big Data;
•    Data Visualisation (tools such as Power BI, Tableau etc.);
•    Data Science (Machine Learning Models)
•    

Competencies:
Head - Big Picture Focus (20)
•    Conceptual Thinker - Executes tactical plans to achieve strategic requirements.
•    Problem Solver - Has the mental agility to identify and solve relevant business challenges.
•    Improvement Driver - Executes and identifies opportunities for commercial innovation and continuous improvement.

Heart – Emotionally Intelligent (30)
•    Culture and Change Champion - Role models practices by living the MTN values and vital behaviours for others to follow.
•    Supportive People Manager - Is self-aware and supports team capability development through opportunity creation for realising potential.
•    Relationship Manager - Builds professional networks across teams through collaboration and co-operation.

Hands – Results Focused (50)
•    Results Achiever - Produces sustainable business results. 
•    Operationally Astute - Sets priorities, plans, organises and co-ordinates the work of others.  
•    You will be working with in a high paced field as demanded by a high paced industry and leading telecommunications provider, which aims to bring out the best in everything we do and deliver. The need to continuously improve one's practical and theoretical skill sets will be paramount to both the team and organizational success. 
The ideal candidate is constructive, a realistic dreamer and innovator. They constantly seek the best solutions to the hardest problems and pursues them avidly. And most importantly, want to enjoy delivery and be proud of your accomplishments, as it does have a broad impact for the company and customers, at the end of the day.
 

Others:
•    Adaptability
•    Analytical
•    Complex Reasoning
•    Cooperativeness
•    Creativity
•    Customer Centricity
•    Intellectual Curiosity
•    Open Communication
•    Optimism
•    Realistic Thinking
•    Reflective
•    Risk Taking
•    Sense of Purpose
•    Socioemotional Intelligence
•    Team Orientation
•    Trust & Transparency

We are a purpose and value-led organization.

At MTN, we believe that understanding our people’s needs and aspirations is key to creating experiences that delight you at work, everyday. We are committed to fostering an environment where every member of our Y’ello Family is heard, understood and empowered to live an inspired life.

Our values keep us grounded and moving in the right direction. Most importantly, they keep us honest. It is not something we claim to be. It is in our DNA.

As an organisation, we consider it our mission to create an exciting and rewarding place to work, where our people can be themselves, thrive in positivity and ignite their full potential. A workplace that boosts creativity and innovation, improves productivity, and ultimately drives meaningful results. A workplace that is built on relationships and achieving a purpose that is bigger than us. This is what we want you to experience with us!

Our commitments go beyond an organisational promise. It is in our leadership and managerial ethos to meaningfully partner with our employees, customers and stakeholders with a vision to realise our shared goals.

We are delighted that you are considering us as your career partner to make a mark in the world. We look forward to your application!