About Paystack
Paystack's mission is to accelerate digital payments on the continent of Africa. Over 200K of some of the most renowned businesses in Nigeria, as well as a growing number of merchants in South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya use Paystack's modern payments gateway. They include the likes of Qatar Airways, MTN, Burger King, UPS, AXA Mansard Insurance, FilmHouse Cinemas, Smile Communications, Air Peace Airlines, Crocs, Under Armour, Richemont Lifestyle Group (RLG), and many others.
In just over 10 years, our growing team has introduced a steady cadence of innovation within the online payments landscape, such as automated recurring payments, the ability for customers to pay directly from their bank accounts, automated chargebacks, and much more. We've been acquired by Stripe and are doubling down on the mission to help build out Africa's payments infrastructure.
Paystack builds technology to help Africa's best businesses grow - from new startups, to market leaders launching new business models. We make it easy for businesses to accept secure payments from multiple local and global payment channels, and then we provide tools to help you retain existing customers, and acquire new ones.
Role Summary
Every engineering team at Paystack builds on a shared cloud platform. If that platform is not secure, nothing built on top of it is secure. This role owns that foundation - not as an oversight function or as a policy team but as the engineering layer that makes the platform trustworthy by design.
The decisions made here are not team-level decisions. You will own Paystack's AWS organisation end-to-end: its architecture, its account structure, and the organisation-wide controls that govern how every team operates within it. The guardrails you set, the permission model you design, and the security primitives you build are what all engineering teams depend on to do their own work effectively. You are upstream of all of them, and what you build has direct consequences for Paystack's customers, merchants, and regulatory standing across multiple markets.
You will inherit a functioning platform and take full ownership of it - improving what exists, completing what was started, and defining what comes next. This is not a role where someone hands you a roadmap. You will identify what needs to be solved before it is articulated, set the technical direction for how platform security works at Paystack, and make architectural decisions with company-wide reach. You will also build the Platform Security function - shaping what it looks like, how it operates, and who it eventually comprises.
You will be expected to:
- Own the security of Paystack's AWS organisation as a whole - its architecture, account structure and the organisation-level controls that apply across every team, product, and environment at the company
- Design, implement, and govern how access works across the entire organisation - defining the permission model from first principles, building the systems that enforce it, and ensuring it holds as the company scales. Examples of the kind of work this involves include self-service permission services and horizontal access control systems that engineering teams can rely on without needing to involve security on every request
- Define and enforce the cloud security baseline that all engineering teams build within - ensuring that what gets provisioned meets a consistently high standard by default, not by intervention
- Act as the Security team's embedded partner to DevOps - present from the start of infrastructure decisions (not at the end of them) and the central point of contact for security questions from across the engineering organisation
- Ensure that secrets management, identity and access boundaries, and the security of the supply chain at the infrastructure layer are robust, auditable, and well-maintained - providing the foundation that Application Security depends on, without owning its remit
- Own the security observability pipeline up to the point of delivery - ensuring logs and signals are generated correctly, structured for consumption, and reliably delivered to Security Operations, which then owns what is done with them
- Translate compliance requirements across multiple active regulatory frameworks and data protection regimes into concrete, automated infrastructure controls - encryption baselines, access governance, audit logging, and programmatic evidence generation - so that GRC has the technical substance it needs to do its work
- Anticipate where the platform's threat landscape is heading, not just where it has been - building controls that are durable under future conditions, not just the ones you can see today
- Write code that solves real infrastructure security problems with the same rigour you would apply to production engineering - your output is a platform, and it needs to hold
- Make security the path of least resistance for engineering - the controls you build should make the secure option the obvious option, with no trade-off in developer velocity
- Define the technical direction and standards for Platform Security with enough clarity and rigour that they hold as the team grows and as the infrastructure evolves beneath them
The ideal candidate for this role will have:
- Deep, production-tested experience securing AWS environments at scale. AWS experience is a firm requirement for this role; you have strong, evidence-based opinions about cloud security architecture because you have encountered the failure modes, not just read about them
- Direct experience owning cloud infrastructure at the organisation level. You have defined account structures, designed organisation-wide policy enforcement, and governed access across a multi-account AWS environment in a context where getting it wrong had real consequences
- The ability to design and implement access control systems that work at company scale - you understand the failure modes of permission models that grow without governance, and you know how to build the systems that prevent them
- The ability to write defensive, high-quality code - you are not a policy engineer who delegates implementation; you build the infrastructure and tooling yourself, and you build it well
- A strong mental model of how the web works end to end, including the security controls and failure modes from client to server and the ability to reason about where those failure modes intersect with cloud infrastructure
- A genuine instinct for finding flaws in systems - you spot what others miss, communicate it clearly, and drive resolution rather than generating reports
- The ability to reduce risk in inherently insecure efforts without defaulting to industry norms. You know when the standard approach is the right one and when it is simply the familiar one, and you are willing to argue the difference
- A track record of inheriting complex, live systems and improving them without breaking what works. You know when to rewrite and when to refine, and you can defend either position
- The ability to operate across the breadth of Platform Security - identity and access management, secrets management, infrastructure security, network controls, container security, and supply chain security at the infrastructure layer - with enough depth to make good decisions in each area and enough range to see how they connect
- Experience working in regulated environments where multiple compliance frameworks are simultaneously active and where audit evidence needs to be generated programmatically, not assembled by hand
- The credibility to be the go-to security contact for an engineering organisation. You engage technically with senior engineers, translate security requirements into decisions they can act on, and push back effectively without creating friction
- A natural inclination to collaborate: you work with engineering teams, not around them, and you understand that a control nobody adopts is not a control
Beneficial
- Experience building or shaping a security sub-function - defining its scope, establishing its operating model, and creating the conditions for others to join and contribute effectively
- Familiarity with the regulatory and data protection landscape across Paystack's markets. The frameworks are not identical and understanding how they interact at the level of technical controls is a genuine differentiator
- Experience working closely with a parent company's security programme while maintaining independent ownership of a subsidiary or regional environment
- Exposure to security incident response at the infrastructure level - not as a SecOps function, but as the person who owns the underlying platform when something goes wrong and needs to understand it deeply and quickly
- Experience establishing security standards and reference architectures that engineering teams adopt because they are genuinely useful - patterns that get used, not mandates that get worked around
Soft Skills
- High agency: you identify problems before they are raised, take ownership without being asked, and drive clarity in ambiguous situations rather than waiting for it
- A knack for clear, precise communication: you can explain a control decision to a senior engineer, a gap to an auditor, and a strategic priority to leadership, and each version lands correctly for its audience; you are also comfortable pushing back when warranted
- Calm and methodical under pressure: when something breaks at the infrastructure level, you are the person others orientate around
- Collaborative by instinct: you build trust with engineering through quality and reliability, not through authority, and you understand that the Security team's credibility is shaped significantly by how Platform Security is perceived by the people it works alongside every day
- A systems thinker who builds for scale: you are not optimising for your own output; you are building something that will outlast your direct involvement in it, and that shapes every decision you make
