Head of Infrastructure

Head of Infrastructure — EasyPay

Location: Cape Town, on-site

• Type: Permanent, full-time
• Reports to: CTO

About Lesaka

Lesaka Technologies is a Southern African fintech building the connected ecosystem for financial inclusion — transactional banking, lending, insurance, payments and cash management for merchants, consumers and enterprise clients across the region. We're publicly listed (Nasdaq: LSAK / JSE: LSK) and growing fast.

EasyPay powers airtime, data, electricity, lotto and 600+ bill payments through the largest retail footprint in South Africa.

The role

EasyPay's infrastructure processes millions of transactions a day across a national retail network — it can't go down, and it has to scale as we add products and merchants. You'll own the infrastructure strategy, platform reliability, and the engineers who run it. This is a hands-on leadership role: you set direction and you're accountable when something breaks at 2am.

What success looks like

• Within 6 months: full visibility into infrastructure cost, capacity and risk, with a remediation plan for the highest-severity gaps underway.
• Within 12 months: measurable uplift in platform uptime and incident recovery time, backed by a infrastructure roadmap the CTO and exec team trust.
• An infrastructure team that operates with clear ownership, on-call discipline, and shrinking mean-time-to-resolution.

What you'll own

• Set and execute EasyPay's infrastructure strategy — cloud, on-prem, and hybrid — aligned to product and transaction growth
• Own platform reliability, capacity planning, and disaster recovery for systems processing high-volume, real-time payment transactions
• Lead and grow the infrastructure engineering team, including on-call rotation and incident response
• Drive infrastructure cost efficiency without compromising uptime or security
• Partner with security, compliance, and engineering leads to keep infrastructure audit-ready (PCI-DSS and relevant financial services requirements)
• Modernise legacy infrastructure and drive automation (IaC, CI/CD, observability) across the estate
• Report infrastructure health, risk, and roadmap directly to the CTO and exec team

What you bring

• 8+ years in infrastructure/platform engineering, with 3+ years leading a team
• Proven experience running high-availability, high-transaction-volume production systems
• Deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and hybrid/on-prem environments
• Strong grasp of networking, security fundamentals, and incident management at scale
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and observability tooling
• Track record of managing infrastructure cost and capacity in a fast-growing environment
• Comfortable being the escalation point when production is down

Nice to have

• Experience in payments, banking, or another regulated financial services environment
• Exposure to PCI-DSS compliance requirements
• Experience managing infrastructure across multiple data centres or regions

Our culture — what we expect from you

Lesaka is a fast-paced fintech. The people who thrive here have a few things in common:

• Ownership. You don't wait to be asked. If something is broken or unclear, you call for the ball and fix it.
• Fast adaptation. Priorities shift, markets move, regulations change. You don't flinch — you re-plan and move.
• Execution mindset. Ideas are cheap. Shipping is the job. You walk slow, run fast: think it through, then move with urgency.
• Customer first. The merchant, consumer or enterprise client is why we exist. Your decisions trace back to them.

If you'd rather optimise a process to perfection over six months than ship something useful in six weeks, this won't be the right fit.