Senior Manager, Platform Operations

Overview

The Senior Manager, Platform Operations is a key leadership role within the Information Technology function, responsible for steering the strategic governance, management, and operational excellence of the organization's technology platforms. Based in Accra and reporting to the General Manager of IT Operations, this role ensures the enterprise platforms are reliable, secure, performant, and continuously improved to support expansive business services efficiently.

Key Duties and Responsibilities

• Formulate and implement the enterprise platform operations strategy.
• Oversee all operational functions related to enterprise platforms ensuring their high availability and resilience.
• Lead teams in Platform Engineering, DevOps, Database Administration, Middleware, Automation, and Platform Monitoring to advance modern infrastructure automation and operational efficiencies.
• Manage API platforms including APIGEE/MADAPI and Enterprise Service Framework.
• Direct the DevOps team to establish modern software delivery practices and automation, including CI/CD standardization, Infrastructure as Code adoption, and GitOps championing.
• Provide strategic oversight for enterprise database systems including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Cassandra focusing on uptime, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and automation.
• Ensure that platforms consistently achieve targeted availability metrics, execute initiatives for redundancy, disaster recovery, and business continuity.
• Supervise proactive monitoring ecosystems such as Application Performance Monitoring, log analytics, alerting, self-healing automation, and AI operations to reduce detection and recovery times.
• Manage vendor performance, contract governance, licensing, capacity forecasting, and budgeting to optimize cost without compromising service quality.
• Drive operational maturity through development of standard operating procedures, runbooks, engineering and automation standards, and continuous service improvement.
• Collaborate extensively with software engineering, enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, service management, and business units to ensure platform capabilities align with business and technology goals.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or related fields is mandatory.
• Professional certifications in databases, DevOps, systems administration, platform engineering, software engineering, or other relevant IT domains are required; Agile certification and advanced degrees such as MBA or MSc in IT are advantageous.

Experience

• At least 8 years of progressive experience in enterprise IT operations, infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, or cloud operations.
• Minimum 5 years of leadership experience managing large, multidisciplinary technical teams.
• Demonstrated expertise managing mission-critical enterprise platforms and leading DevOps transformation initiatives.
• Strong background in database administration, operational governance, cloud operations (Azure and/or AWS), and hybrid infrastructure environments.
• Experience in telecommunications or regulated environments and complex multi-stakeholder models is a plus.

Professional Competencies

• Expertise in platform operations and API platform management (APIGEE/MADAPI, Enterprise Service Framework).
• Proficient with container orchestration and API/service connectivity tools (Kubernetes, OpenShift, Tanzu, Kong).
• Hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure (Azure, AWS), CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible), and DevOps principles.
• Strong knowledge of enterprise databases administration and lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with Linux and Windows server administration, ITIL service management frameworks.
• Understanding of disaster recovery, business continuity, cybersecurity fundamentals, and scripting languages such as PowerShell, Python, and Bash.
• Skilled in platform engineering, Site Reliability Engineering principles, automation, orchestration, and monitoring.
• Ability to perform structured root cause analysis, data-driven decision making, and manage risk-based trade-offs.
• Competence with network topologies (TCP/IP, LAN, WAN) and troubleshooting.
• Experience producing metrics and reporting dashboards.

Organizational Culture and Values

The role demands adherence to company values including leading with care, agility in collaboration, respectful service, integrity-driven positivity, and inclusive actions. It also expects demonstration of vital behaviors such as candid communication, accountability, active collaboration, and execution focus.