Senior Data Engineer / Platform Lead, Pretoria

Pretoria, South Africa | Posted on 12/03/2026

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Data Engineer to design, build, and scale our modern data platform. This role is ideal for a hands‑on technical leader who can architect robust data pipelines, drive best practices in data engineering, and mentor a growing team.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Release&Deployment– Support automated deployment, post‑release validation, rollback strategies.

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

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

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).

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

Preferred Qualifications

Infrastructure as Code.

Machine learning data pipelines.

Data governance, security, compliance.

Team leadership / technical lead experience.

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