Cape Town City Centre: Data Solutions Architect / Senior Data Engineer

We’re seeking a Data Solutions Architect / Senior Data Engineer to join a growing Data and AI team working on an innovative cloud-based data warehousing and AI solution. The team is developing a client-facing platform that integrates data warehousing with a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system — transforming unstructured and structured data into organized, summarized, and insightful information for business use. You’ll play a leading role in building out the production-ready environment, ensuring compliance, scalability, and performance, while contributing to the development of advanced AI-driven insights and automation capabilities. High-Level Project Overview The platform focuses on the aggregation, synthesis, and summarization of unstructured data through a secure, scalable Azure-based architecture. A proof of concept has already been built (a chatbot web app hosted on Azure), and the next phase involves expanding this into a fully integrated production solution. Your work will involve: Designing and developing scalable data pipelines, storage, and processing components in Azure. Supporting the integration of RAG systems with AI models and vector databases. Enabling robust data flow between AI, search, and warehousing layers. Contributing to architectural decisions on performance, governance, and scalability. Tech Stack Framework / Orchestration: Azure AI Foundry (for AI workflow orchestration and management) LLM Provider: Azure OpenAI Service (designed to be model-agnostic for future extensibility) Storage: Azure Blob Storage Gen 2 (for documents and source data) Vector Store / Search: Azure AI Search (vector hybrid search capabilities) App Hosting: Azure App Service (chatbot web app interface integrated with RAG) Embedding Model: Azure OpenAI text-embedding-3-large Data Warehousing: Azure Data Factory for data extraction, transformation, and integration between AI Foundry, AI Search, and Blob Storage Key Responsibilities Architect and implement end-to-end data pipelines and data warehousing solutions in Azure. Design and optimize ETL/ELT workflows using Azure Data Factory or equivalent. Collaborate with AI developers and cloud engineers to connect data pipelines to AI/RAG systems. Implement data models to support text retrieval, embedding, and summarization processes. Ensure compliance with data governance and security best practices. Mentor and support junior team members as the data capability scales. Required Skills & Experience 7 years’ experience as a Data Engineer or Data Architect in enterprise environments. Strong proficiency in Azure Cloud (Data Factory, Blob Storage, Synapse, AI Foundry, OpenAI). Advanced SQL and Python development experience. Proven experience with cloud data migration and modern data warehousing . Knowledge of vector databases , AI model integration , or RAG frameworks highly advantageous. Understanding of data orchestration, governance, and security principles. Experience in insurance or financial services preferred. Why Join This is a greenfield opportunity to help build a Data & AI capability from the ground up . The team currently consists of four engineers and is expected to grow rapidly in 2026. You’ll be working on cutting-edge Azure and AI technologies, shaping an intelligent platform that makes sense of large, messy datasets and transforms them into business-ready insights. * In order to comply with the POPI Act, for future career opportunities, we require your permission to maintain your personal details on our database. By completing and returning this form you give PBT your consent * If you have not received any feedback after 2 weeks, please consider you application as unsuccessful.