Cape Town: Data Solutions Architect / Senior Data Engineer posted by PBT Group

Were 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.

Youll 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. Youll 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.

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