Database Reliability Engineer, Cape Town

OVERALL PURPOSE

We are building a small, focused innovation pod inside a fintech scale-up — and data reliability is at the core of everything we ship.

This is not a traditional DBA role. You will own the full lifecycle of data in the pod: pipelines, migrations, schema safety, and the observability to know when something breaks before the business does. You will also own CI/CD and the infrastructure layer on Azure — because in a small, fast-moving team, deployment reliability and data reliability are the same problem.

If you have made the shift from protecting databases to enabling teams to move fast without breaking data, and want to build something from the ground up within a fast-moving agentic development process, this is the role.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Design, execute, and safeguard database and schema migrations — including rollback strategies
• Build and maintain data pipelines — from ingestion through to reliable, queryable outputs
• Work with modern data tooling (dbt, Snowflake, or equivalent) as the pod's data stack matures
• Set up and maintain observability across both data and application layers: logging, metrics, alerting
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for rapid, safe deployment
• Own the infrastructure layer on Azure: environments, configuration, secrets, networking
• Manage containerized workloads using Docker and Azure managed services
• Document data and infrastructure decisions so production teams can inherit what we build

THE EXPERIENCE WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• Production experience with database migrations and data pipelines in a regulated or financial environment
• Comfort with modern data tooling — dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery, or equivalent
• Demonstrated experience owning CI/CD pipelines end-to-end
• Hands-on with Docker and Azure managed services
• Strong understanding of observability tooling across data and application layers
• Comfortable operating as the sole data reliability and platform function within a small team
• Systematic approach to data integrity, deployment risk, and rollback planning

You will be expected to grow into:

• Infrastructure as Code practices (Terraform or equivalent) — prior IaC experience is a strong advantage but not a blocker for the right candidate

Advantageous:

• Familiarity with agentic development workflows or AI-assisted tooling
• Prior experience preparing data systems for handoff to a larger ops or platform team

OUR TECH STACK

• Azure
• Snowflake
• DBT
• Python
• SQL
• Hex
• GitHub