Cape Town: Senior Data Engineer posted by DataFin Recruitment

ENVIRONMENT:

A bold Marketing Consultancy for challengers is on the hunt for a Senior Data Engineer to join its Cape Town-based Media & Data team. This is not your typical data role its for someone who thrives on building systems that power breakthrough marketing strategies designed to disrupt the norm, outsmart competitors, and deliver outsized results. Youll take charge of architecting, building, and maintaining robust data infrastructure that fuels media planning, activation, and performance measurement. Working with diverse datasets from first-party and retail media to CRM, digital analytics, syndicated, and financial data youll ensure data is clean, connected, and activation-ready across every channel. This is a hands-on and strategic position, where youll design scalable pipelines, champion data governance, and collaborate closely with data planners, strategists, and media buyers to turn data into intelligent action.

DUTIES:

• Design, build, and optimize data pipelines and ETL processes to integrate diverse data sources (ad servers, DSPs, retail media, CRM, CDPs, web analytics, social, financial, product).
• Architect and maintain cloud-based data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) to ensure scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Ensure interoperability between their products and tools, client martech stacks, and external media platforms.
• Implement data validation, cleansing, and monitoring frameworks to ensure accuracy and reliability of client data.
• Enforce data privacy and compliance standards (GDPR, CCPA, and client-specific governance frameworks).
• Develop processes to document lineage, metadata, and manage user permissions across datasets.
• Partner with data planners and strategists to translate client business needs into technical data solutions.
• Provide technical expertise to support CDP implementation, tagging, and identity resolution strategies.
• Collaborate with analytics teams to optimize data availability for dashboards, econometric models, and campaign reporting.
• Work closely with their Chief Product Officer and other members of the engineering and product teams to collaborate on their own products and capabilities.
• Eventually, mentor junior data engineers, ensuring consistent delivery of code and products within organisational best practices.
• Lead data engineering input in client discussions and technical workshops, articulating complex systems in clear, strategic language.
• Stay ahead of emerging data engineering technologies, martech integrations, and media data standards; recommend innovations that improve efficiency and performance.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Youre highly organized and deliver excellence without compromise.
• You think like an entrepreneurcurious, bold, and unafraid to get stuck in.
• They do not require a minimum years of experience, but you do need to have significant experience in data strategy, analytics, and planning, ideally with an agency background.
• Expertise in and a strong point of view on the role of data in brand strategy, creative, paid media, and overall effectiveness measurement.
• Deep understanding of how data drives modern media investment across channels (predominantly, CTV, retail media, social, and search).
• Strong knowledge of major marketing technology providers and tools (their partners include marketing automation like Braze; DSPs including the Trade Desk; CDP providers like Rokt/formerly mParticle; reporting platforms like AdVerity, among others)
• Proven ability to design measurement frameworks, manage data governance considerations, and translate insights into business growth.

Extra points if

• Youve helped scale a start-up, agency, or consultancy.
• Youve lived the battle of challengers vs. incumbents.
• You have experience inputting and developing advanced marketing analytical models or data science outputs, including media mix modelling,