Platform and Infrastructure Engineer

COMESA CLEARING HOUSE

VACANCIES

Background

The COMESA Clearing House (CCH) is an institution of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) mandated to contribute to the advancement of regional economic integration by facilitating efficient cross-border payments and settlement among Member States. Headquartered in Harare, Zimbabwe, CCH develops and operates regional payment infrastructure aimed at reducing the cost and complexity of cross-border transactions and supporting increased intra-regional trade.

CCH operates the Regional Payment and Settlement System (REPSS), which facilitates cross-border settlement among participating countries, and is currently implementing the Digital Retail Payments Platform (DRPP), a regional initiative designed to enable fast, affordable, secure and interoperable cross-border retail payments. The DRPP is built on the Mojaloop open-source model, providing an interoperable foundation for connecting participating financial institutions and payment service providers across the region. As part of the DRPP infrastructure, CCH is also implementing a financial crime detection system based on Tazama to support transaction monitoring and strengthen the platform’s ability to identify and manage fraud and other financial crime risks.

Through this infrastructure, the DRPP is intended to strengthen the regional digital payments ecosystem, support more efficient and accessible digital financial services, and contribute to increased regional trade and economic integration.

Applications are invited from suitably qualified and experienced professionals from COMESA Member States for the following full-time, project-funded positions to support the implementation and operation of the DRPP.

JOB DESCRIPTION: Platform and Infrastructure Engineer

Job Title: Platform and Infrastructure Engineer
Duty Station: Zimbabwe / Remote. May require travel within COMESA  

JOB PURPOSE

Design, implement, operate, and maintain all DRPP infrastructure, including the AWS production environment, on-premises staging, Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, and network architecture. Responsible for provisioning the full observability stack as part of every environment build, applying infrastructure security controls by design, and overseeing the Microsoft 365 internal IT footprint as a minor but real part of the role.

MAIN DUTIES AND ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Own the AWS production environment, including accounts, VPCs, EKS clusters, and managed services including RDS, DocumentDB, MSK, KMS, and Secrets Manager.
• Own the on-premises staging environment, including Rook Ceph distributed storage, hypervisor, networking, and access controls.
• Maintain and evolve infrastructure-as-code using Terraform, Terragrunt, and Helm charts.
• Manage CI/CD pipelines for build, test, and release automation via ArgoCD GitOps.
• Provision and maintain the full Grafana LGTM observability stack, including Prometheus (collection and alerting), Mimir (long-term S3-backed metrics storage), Loki (log aggregation), Tempo (distributed tracing backend), and Grafana (dashboards), as a standard part of every environment, not as an afterthought.
• Apply security controls at the infrastructure layer by design, including network segmentation, least-privilege IAM, Vault secrets management, and Istio service mesh mTLS, in conjunction with the Security Engineer.
• Oversee internal IT, including Microsoft 365 administration and end-user support, estimated at 10 to 20 percent of role time.
• Maintain environment parity between staging and production.
• Support cost optimisation and cloud spend management.

MINIMUM ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

• Relevant undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline. Relevant cloud certifications, such as AWS Solutions Architect, CKA, or equivalent, are an advantage.
• 5+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure, or a related role.
• Production AWS experience, including VPC design, EKS, RDS, MSK, KMS, and Secrets Manager.
• Kubernetes operations at production scale, including cluster management, Helm, Customize, networking, and storage.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience using Terraform and Terragrunt.
• CI/CD pipeline ownership using ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or equivalent GitOps tooling.
• Experience provisioning and maintaining the Grafana observability stack, including Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, or equivalent LGTM components.
• Experience managing a hybrid cloud and on-premises environment.
• Be a national of a COMESA Member State.

COMPETENCIES

• Deep technical expertise in cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively across engineering, security, and operations teams.
• Proactive and self-directed with a focus on reliability and automation.
• Good communication skills for documenting and explaining infrastructure decisions.

LANGUAGES

Fluency in English and a working knowledge of French and/or Arabic will be an added advantage.

PERIOD OF APPOINTMENT

This is a grant-funded contractual position. The duration of the engagement is not fixed and will be subject to the continued availability of grant funding.

CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATION

Applications, including a detailed Curriculum Vitae, should be emailed to the Executive Secretary of COMESA Clearing House, 4 Purbeck Close, Highlands, Harare, Zimbabwe. Email: info@comesach.org  no later than 21stSeptember 2026. Applications received after this date will not be considered.