Junior Data Engineer

Junior Data Engineer

Location: Cape Town, hybrid · Type: Permanent, full-time · Reports to: Head of Data

About Lesaka

Lesaka Technologies is a Southern African fintech building the connected ecosystem for financial inclusion — transactional banking, lending, insurance, payments and cash management for merchants, consumers and enterprise clients across the region. We're publicly listed (Nasdaq: LSAK / JSE: LSK) and growing fast. EasyPay powers airtime, data, electricity, lotto and 600+ bill payments through the largest retail footprint in South Africa.

The role

EasyPay's transaction volumes generate data at serious scale, and that data needs to be trustworthy, accessible and fast to query. You'll join the data engineering team to help build and maintain the pipelines that move this data from source systems into the warehouse, and keep it clean along the way. This is a hands-on role for someone early in their career who wants to learn production data engineering inside a live fintech environment.

What you'll own

• Build and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines that move transactional data into the warehouse
• Write and optimise SQL queries and transformations for reporting and analytics
• Monitor pipeline runs and troubleshoot failures before they become incidents
• Support data quality checks and flag anomalies in source or pipeline data
• Document data flows and schema changes so the team can move fast without guessing
• Assist with migrating and modelling data as the EasyPay platform evolves

What you bring

• 1-2 years' experience in a data engineering, analytics engineering, or backend role (internships count)
• Solid SQL — comfortable writing joins, aggregations and window functions
• Working knowledge of Python for scripting and data processing
• Exposure to a cloud data platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Understanding of relational databases and basic data modelling concepts
• A relevant qualification in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to have

• Exposure to Airflow, dbt, or a similar orchestration/transformation tool
• Experience with Git and CI/CD basics
• Interest in payments, fintech, or high-volume transactional systems

Our culture — what we expect from you

Lesaka is a fast-paced fintech. The people who thrive here have a few things in common:

• Ownership: You don't wait to be asked. If something is broken or unclear, you call for the ball and fix it.
• Fast adaptation: Priorities shift, markets move, regulations change. You don't flinch — you re-plan and move.
• Execution mindset: Ideas are cheap. Shipping is the job. You walk slow, run fast: think it through, then move with urgency.
• Customer first: The merchant, consumer or enterprise client is why we exist. Your decisions trace back to them.

If you'd rather optimise a process to perfection over six months than ship something useful in six weeks, this won't be the right fit.