Manager – Data & Big Data Operations

ABOUT THE COMPANY

The Kenya Revenue Authority was established by an Act of Parliament, Chapter 469 of the laws of Kenya, which became effective on 1st July 1995. KRA is charged with collecting revenue on behalf of the government of Kenya.
The core functions of the Authority are: -
To assess, collect and account for all revenues in accordance with the written laws and the specified provisions of the written laws.
To advise on matters relating to the administration of, and collection of revenue under the written laws or the specified provisions of the written laws.
To perform such other functions in relation to revenue as the Minster may direct.

JOB SUMMARY

The job holder is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the infrastructure and tools that will enable the organization to process and analyse large volumes of structured and unstructured data. The role is critical for leveraging big data technologies to derive actionable insights and support data-driven decision-making.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of the Big Data stack (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, or cloud-native equivalents like Azure Synapse/Google BigQuery).Develop and implement data operations strategies aligned with organizational goals, ensuring efficiency, scalability, and sustainability.Ensure data analytics platforms and infrastructure is elastic enough to handle any variations in data and analytics traffic including unexpected spikes.Oversee the ingestion of unstructured and semi-structured data into a centralized repository for analytics.Evaluate, implement, and optimize data tools, platforms, and emerging technologies to enhance operational performance and analytics capability.Maintain real-time data pipelines that allow for immediate analytics e.g. risk profiling and "on-the-spot" compliance alerts.Optimize massive batch ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)/ELT (Extract, Load and Transform jobs that move data from operational databases into the data warehousing for reporting.Use tools like Apache Airflow to manage complex dependencies between hundreds of different data workflows across KRA’s internal and external ecosystems.Implement disaster recovery and failover strategies to ensure that the Data Management & Analytics (DM&A) tools are available 24/7.Work with Data Scientists to optimize complex SQL or NoSQL queries.Manage the compute and storage costs of the Big Data environment, ensuring KRA gets maximum ROI on its hardware or cloud spend.Implement fine-grained access control (Role-Based Access Control) to ensure sensitive information is only accessible to authorized users.Oversee the technical implementation of data masking and encryption "at rest" and "in transit" to comply with the Data Protection Act.Maintain logs of who accessed what data and when, providing a "activity trails" for security audits.Ensure data integrity, accuracy, security, and compliance with regulatory, audit, integrity, QMS, and risk management frameworks.Collaborate with internal stakeholders, resolve data-related issues, and advise leadership through actionable insights and reliable reporting.Implement corporate initiatives in the Unit: Performance Management, Audit, Integrity, Quality Management Systems, and Risk Management.Support staff career development and performance enhancement within the unit, ensuring alignment with departmental goals.

REQUIRED SKILLS

Strategizing, Data analysis, Business intelligence

REQUIRED EDUCATION

Post-graduate education