Data Centre & Cloud Mgt Officer job at ASA Microfinance (U) Ltd

ASA Microfinance Uganda Ltd (ASA Uganda) is a for-profit, non-deposit taking Microfinance Institution, operating as a microfinance company and regulated by the Uganda Microfinance Regulatory Authority (UMRA). ASA Microfinance Uganda Ltd is also a member of the Association of Microfinance Institutions of Uganda (AMFIU). ASA Uganda commenced operations in 2013. ASA Uganda is a subsidiary of ASA International, one of the world’s largest international microfinance institutions globally and operates in 13 countries in Africa and Asia. The company was listed in the premium segment on the London Stock Exchange in July ’2018. ASA Microfinance (U) Ltd is seeking for professional, confident, self-motivated, and committed team players to reinforce its capacity by filling the following vacant positions:

Data Centre & Cloud Mgt Officer

Reporting Relationships: Roles that report to this position directly and indirectly.

Stakeholder Management: Key stakeholders that the position holder will need to liaise/work with to be successful in this role.

Job Title: Data Centre & Cloud Mgt Officer

Reports to: Infrastructure Operations Manager

Department: IT

Grade: VI

Direct Reports: N/A

Internal: All departments.

External: Vendors & Consultants

Job Purpose: To administer and optimize ASA Microfinance Uganda Ltd.'s data centre infrastructure and cloud environments, ensuring availability, scalability, resilience, and compliance for all mission critical systems.

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

Data Centre Operations & Infrastructure Management (30% weighting):

• Manage on-prem data centre facilities including racks, cabling, power, cooling, and physical security controls.
• Ensure high availability of compute, storage (SAN/NAS), and virtualization platforms.
• Enforce hardening standards for hypervisors, and cloud environments.
• Maintain asset inventory and lifecycle management of infrastructure components.

Cloud Platform Administration & support (15% weighting):

• Provision and manage workloads across public/private cloud environments (IaaS/PaaS).
• Implement cloud governance (tagging, cost controls, access policies, workload isolation).
• Optimize cloud architecture for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency (FinOps alignment).
• Support compliance with regulatory requirements (e.g., central bank, data protection laws).

Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (25% weighting):

• Design and manage enterprise backup strategies (full, incremental, differential).
• Ensure backup integrity, encryption, offsite storage, and retention compliance.
• Regularly test restoration processes to validate data recoverability.
• Maintain DR architecture (active-active, active-passive, or hybrid models).
• Define and enforce RPO/RTO targets for critical systems (CBS, payments, USSD).
• Conduct periodic DR drills and failover testing with documented outcomes.

Capacity Planning & Optimization (20% weighting):

• Monitor compute, memory, storage, and IOPS utilization across environments.
• Forecast infrastructure needs based on business growth and digital adoption.
• Optimize virtualization and cloud resource allocation.

Vendor & SLA Management (10% weighting):

• Manage cloud providers, co-location vendors, and hardware suppliers.
• Track SLAs, uptime guarantees, and support responsiveness.
• Support procurement and technical evaluation of infrastructure solutions.

Ideal Job Specifications:

Academic qualifications: University degree in Information technology/Computer Science/Electrical Engineering/Telecommunications or related field.

Professional training: Training and/or certification in below is added advantage: Data center virtualization e.g. VMware Administration; Cloud environments e.g. Azure, AWS Certified Solutions.

Desired work experience: Two years' experience in Data center integration, administration, monitoring & support in medium-to-large organizations.

Technical Competencies:

• Practical knowledge of Virtualization & Resource Optimization.
• Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Engineering knowledge.
• Storage, Backup, Recovery & Data Protection tools management skills.
• Hybrid Infrastructure Architecture (On-Prem & Cloud) design & integration knowledge.

Behavioural Competencies:

• Ability to maintain clarity and structure during outages, failovers, and high-impact incidents.
• Strong control over third-party service delivery, performance tracking, and accountability enforcement.
• Proactive capacity planning, DR readiness, and lifecycle management.
• Ability to support evaluation of trade-offs between performance, cost, and availability with a strong bias toward resilience.

• Manage on-prem data centre facilities including racks, cabling, power, cooling, and physical security controls.
• Ensure high availability of compute, storage (SAN/NAS), and virtualization platforms.
• Enforce hardening standards for hypervisors, and cloud environments.
• Maintain asset inventory and lifecycle management of infrastructure components.
• Provision and manage workloads across public/private cloud environments (IaaS/PaaS).
• Implement cloud governance (tagging, cost controls, access policies, workload isolation).
• Optimize cloud architecture for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency (FinOps alignment).
• Support compliance with regulatory requirements (e.g., central bank, data protection laws).
• Design and manage enterprise backup strategies (full, incremental, differential).
• Ensure backup integrity, encryption, offsite storage, and retention compliance.
• Regularly test restoration processes to validate data recoverability.
• Maintain DR architecture (active-active, active-passive, or hybrid models).
• Define and enforce RPO/RTO targets for critical systems (CBS, payments, USSD).
• Conduct periodic DR drills and failover testing with documented outcomes.
• Monitor compute, memory, storage, and IOPS utilization across environments.
• Forecast infrastructure needs based on business growth and digital adoption.
• Optimize virtualization and cloud resource allocation.
• Manage cloud providers, co-location vendors, and hardware suppliers.
• Track SLAs, uptime guarantees, and support responsiveness.
• Support procurement and technical evaluation of infrastructure solutions.

• Practical knowledge of Virtualization & Resource Optimization.
• Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Engineering knowledge.
• Storage, Backup, Recovery & Data Protection tools management skills.
• Hybrid Infrastructure Architecture (On-Prem & Cloud) design & integration knowledge.
• Ability to maintain clarity and structure during outages, failovers, and high-impact incidents.
• Strong control over third-party service delivery, performance tracking, and accountability enforcement.
• Proactive capacity planning, DR readiness, and lifecycle management.
• Ability to support evaluation of trade-offs between performance, cost, and availability with a strong bias toward resilience.

• University degree in Information technology/Computer Science/Electrical Engineering/Telecommunications or related field.
• Training and/or certification in Data center virtualization e.g. VMware Administration; Cloud environments e.g. Azure, AWS Certified Solutions is an added advantage.