Job Description

PayG Phones TechOps Manager

Department: Global Analytics and Technology

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Africa

Description

Location : Lagos, Nigeria or Nairobi, Kenya.

About the role

The PayG Phones TechOps Manager is accountable for the end-to-end technical operations of the PAYG Phones portfolio. The role ensures that MDM platforms, payment-triggered controls, security settings, partner integrations, and unlock operations remain stable, compliant, and scalable. This is an execution-focused role: it translates approved product, policy and commercial resolutions into steady operational delivery, while maintaining service continuity and control discipline across markets.

What you will be expected to do

1. MDM Platform Operations & Service Ownership

• Act as the operational owner for all assisted PAYG Phones MDM environments: healthy configuration, access governance, tenant hygiene, and business continuity. Administer device-control capabilities: enrollment, lock and unlock triggers, offline unlock paths, temporary unlocks, SIM controls, and lost-phone blocking, in line with approved product and policy rules.
• Define platform operating standards, monitoring thresholds, issue escalation paths, and rollback protocols for critical changes. Implement and maintain approved MDM configurations consistently across markets; escalate design or policy gaps to Product and business owners.

1. Incident Management & Problem Resolution

• Run a structured incident management process for MDM, device-control, enrollment, unlock, SMS, and integration failures.
• Prioritize incidents by business severity, restore service rapidly, communicate impact clearly, and coordinate fixes with Engineering, vendors, and Operations.
• Maintain an issue tracker with ownership, ETA, status confidence, escalation level, and preventive-action follow-through.
• Guide post-incident root cause evaluation; ensure corrective and preventive actions are implemented and verified.

1. Unlock Operations & Customer Control Journeys

• Own operational execution and reliability for online unlocks, offline unlocks, USSD-based unlock flows, temporary unlocks, and post-payment device release processes.
• Monitor unlock success rates and investigate failure patterns by market, OEM, MDM, app version, and integration point.
• Maintain resilient fallback procedures for high-risk customer-impact scenarios while minimizing fraud and policy leakage.
• Partner with Collections, Customer Care, and Field Operations so operational teams comprehend approved unlock pathways, exception handling, and approval controls.

1. Security, Risk & Compliance Controls

• Maintain strong control over MDM security updates, license lifecycle, access rights, and configuration changes across all assisted platforms.
• Own risk dashboards, compliance checks, and control reviews that surface service exposure, misconfiguration, aging licenses, or policy breaches before they create customer or revenue risk.
• Coordinate blocking controls for lost phones, misuse scenarios, and high-risk device exceptions at server, tenant, or MDM level as applicable.
• Assist internal audit, compliance, and InfoSec requests with evidence, process documentation, and remediation tracking.

1. Vendor, Partner & Integration Management

• Serve as the primary technical operations counterpart to OEMs, MDM vendors and integration providers.
• Track vendor performance against uptime, defect resolution, roadmap dedication, security fixes, and launch deliverables. Escalate unresolved partner issues with clear evidence, business impact articulation, and proposed mitigation options.

1. Project Delivery & Change Implementation

• Coordinate TechOps workstreams from related Phone projects and deliverables: migrations, unlock operationalization, security update optimization, launch enablement, reporting improvements, and process redesign.
• Break initiatives into milestones, reliance, owners, risks, and test-readiness criteria..
• Balance project delivery with day-to-day operational escalations through a transparent prioritization framework.

1. Data, Reporting & resolution

• Own reporting requirements for device operations, incidents, unlock performance, risk signals, license status, and open-issue backlog.
• Develop or validate operational dashboards and data pipelines used for service visibility and market-level conclusion (Looker or equivalent).
• Use data to identify recurring failure patterns, process bottlenecks, control weaknesses, and opportunities for automation.
• Provide concise operational reviews to senior stakeholders: trend breakdown, risk commentary, service-impact summaries, and resolution requests.

1. Process Governance & Documentation

• Create and maintain SOPs, FAQs, control frameworks, troubleshooting guides, approval matrices, and escalation maps for all major TechOps processes.
• Standardize repeatable workflows: issue logging, incident reviews, unlock approvals, license monitoring, and launch checklists.
• Keep documentation usable by frontline, country, and assist teams: not only technical specialists.
• Embed lessons learned from incidents and projects into documented operating practice.

1. Cross-Functional Management

• Coordinate effectively across Product, Engineering, Commercial, Customer Operations, Risk, Compliance, Collections, Finance, and Country teams.
• Translate technical constraints into business language, and business priorities into executable technical actions.
• Influence prioritization, build consensus during incidents or launches, and keep stakeholders aligned on trade-offs and timelines.
• Coach evaluators or coordinators assist TechOps processes and raise overall operating maturity.

1. Field Immersion & Ground Truth

• Spend regular time in-country with agents, PayG customers, service desks and country teams. Ride along on device activations, unlock scenarios, payment collections and post-payment device releases so you see MDM, unlock flows and integrations behave in the real world — not just in dashboards.
• Use every field visit to surface pain points, edge cases and workarounds that don't show up in the ticketing system. Convert them into concrete follow-ups: an SOP update, a configuration hardening, a test case, a UAT scenario, a vendor escalation, or a training request via the Training Liaison.
• Never be an armchair TechOps manager. Field reality drives the PayG Phones TechOps backlog.

You might be a strong candidate if you have

• Bachelor's degree or its equivalent in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Telecommunications, or a related technical field.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in Technology Operations, Product Operations, IT Operations, or Enterprise Mobility.
• 4+ years managing production technology platforms, including Incident, Problem, Release, and Change Management.
• 4+ years of people management and managing cross-functional technical teams.
• 4+ years of Mobile Device Management (MDM) experience (e.g., Samsung Knox, Android Enterprise, NuovoPay, Intune, Workspace ONE).
• Experience assisting multi-country/global operations.
• Strong experience in vendor management, including SLA governance and technical escalations.
• Hands-on knowledge of Android ecosystem, APIs, SQL, system integrations, and data evaluation.
• Proven experience delivering large-scale technology rollouts and managing production environments.

What Sun King Offers

• Professional growth in a dynamic, rapidly expanding, high-social-impact industry
• An open-minded, collaborative culture made up of enthusiastic colleagues who are driven by the challenge of innovation towards profound impact on people and the planet.
• A truly multicultural experience: you will have the chance to work with and learn from people from different geographies, nationalities, and backgrounds.
• Structured, tailored learning and development programs that help you become a better leader, manager, and professional through the Sun Center for Leadership.