Pretoria: Senior Data Engineer / Platform Lead posted by Sabenza IT & Recruitment

You will play a critical role in enabling analytics, data science, owning the end to end engineering of data pipelines and data products so that downstream reporting, and integrations run on reliable, scalable, governed, and observable data foundations.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Design scalable, secure, high-performance data architectures (lakehouse, warehouse, hybrid).

• Lead batch & real-time data pipelines and CI/CD, version control, and IaC best practices.

• Ensure data quality, governance, and observability.

Data Platform & Engineering

• Build & maintain ETL/ELT workflows, optimize queries, and manage storage.

• Integrate data from APIs, 3rd-party systems, and streaming platforms.

• Support analytics and BI tooling with curated datasets.

Collaboration & Mentorship

• Mentor junior/mid-level engineers.

• Partner with Data Scientists, Analysts, Product Managers, and Engineering teams.

• Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.

SDLC-Aligned Responsibilities

1. Discovery & Planning Clarify requirements, define acceptance criteria, break initiatives into implementable slices.

2. Solution Design & Architecture Own data architecture, define standards, ensure performance, security, and monitorability.

3. Build & Implementation Develop pipelines, transformations, orchestrations, and automation.

4. Testing & Quality Execute validations, reconcile data, ensure testability and reduce defects.

5. Release & Deployment Support automated deployment, post-release validation, rollback strategies.

6. Operations & Monitoring Own production pipelines, monitor, troubleshoot, implement preventive controls.

7. Governance & Documentation Maintain lineage, dataset definitions, runbooks; enforce security and compliance.

8. Leadership & Team Enablement Review work, set standards, coordinate dependencies, drive continuous improvement.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering or related field

• Strong SQL, MS Fabric, Data Factory, Power BI

• Cloud platform experience (AWS/Azure)

• Modern data stack & orchestration tools experience

• Strong data modeling, system design, and production pipeline experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Real-time streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub)

• Infrastructure as Code

• Machine learning data pipelines

• Data governance, security, compliance

• Team leadership / technical lead experience