Data Engineer

Job Title: Data Engineer
Company: AIT Global
Employment Type: Contract – 12 months (renewable), client-site placement
Work Location: Hybrid, Johannesburg, Gauteng

Job Purpose
AIT Global is seeking an experienced Data Engineer to be placed at our client's site to design, build and maintain reliable data pipelines and data platforms. The role requires a hands-on engineer who can independently take data from source systems through to curated, analytics-ready datasets, work across cloud and on-premise environments, and collaborate with analysts, business users and application teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines to ingest data from source systems (ERP, HR, finance, operational and third-party systems) into the data warehouse / lakehouse.
• Develop and maintain data models (staging, dimensional / star schema, data marts) to support reporting and analytics.
• Write efficient, well-structured SQL and Python for data transformation, cleansing and validation.
• Implement data quality checks, reconciliation and monitoring so that data arrives complete, accurate and on time.
• Orchestrate and schedule pipelines; troubleshoot and resolve failures.
• Integrate data via APIs (REST/SOAP), flat files, database connections and streaming sources where required.
• Apply data governance, security and POPIA requirements: access control, masking of personal data, audit trails.
• Document data flows, mappings and pipeline logic; maintain source-to-target documentation.
• Support BI and analytics teams (Power BI / Tableau) with clean, well-modelled datasets.
• Work with DevOps practices: version control (Git), CI/CD for data pipelines, environment promotion.
• Participate in requirements sessions with business and technical stakeholders; estimate and deliver against agreed timelines.

Required Skills & Experience

• Minimum 4 years of experience as a Data Engineer or in a similar data-focused engineering role.
• Strong SQL (complex joins, window functions, performance tuning) on at least one major database (SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL or similar).
• Strong Python for data engineering (pandas / PySpark, API calls, scripting).
• Hands-on experience with at least one cloud data platform: Azure (Data Factory, Synapse, Databricks), AWS (Glue, Redshift, S3, Lambda) or GCP (BigQuery, Dataflow).
• Experience with a big-data / distributed processing framework, preferably Apache Spark / Databricks.
• Solid understanding of data warehousing concepts (Kimball dimensional modelling, slowly changing dimensions, data lake / lakehouse architecture).
• Experience with pipeline orchestration tools (Azure Data Factory, Airflow, or similar).
• Proven experience building data quality and reconciliation checks.
• Familiarity with Git and CI/CD for data workloads.
• Ability to work independently at a client site, managing priorities and communicating clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Advantageous

• Cloud certification (Azure Data Engineer Associate DP-203, AWS Data Engineer, Databricks Certified Data Engineer, or Google Professional Data Engineer).
• Experience with streaming technologies (Kafka, Event Hubs, Kinesis).
• Experience with dbt, Snowflake or Microsoft Fabric.
• Exposure to Power BI / Tableau semantic modelling.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Bicep) and containerisation (Docker).
• Experience integrating data from ERP / HCM systems (Oracle Fusion, SAP, Dynamics 365).
• Prior consulting / client-facing experience.
• Financial services, mining or telecoms domain experience.

Qualification

• Relevant tertiary qualification in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Mathematics or Statistics (or equivalent experience).

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Johannesburg South, Gauteng