Senior Specialist: Data Engineering

We’re Hiring: Senior Specialist: Data Engineering | Data and Analytics

Are you an experienced data engineering professional with a passion for building scalable data platforms and delivering reliable, high-quality data pipelines?

Lesaka Merchant is looking for a Senior Specialist: Data Engineering to join our Merchants Operations Division. This role is ideal for a highly skilled individual who can design, build, and operate robust data pipelines while driving engineering best practices and contributing to platform architecture.

Job purpose

To design, build, and operate reliable, scalable data pipelines and platform components that consolidate data from multiple source systems into the group’s central data store, delivering end-to-end significant data engineering workstreams, contributing to platform architecture and engineering standards, identifying and resolving complex engineering challenges, and serving as a consistent advocate for engineering quality, reliability, and best practice across the data platform.

Key Responsibility Areas

Reliable Data Pipelines and Platform Operations designed and delivered

• Independently design and build robust data ingestion pipelines from heterogeneous source systems (relational databases, REST APIs, flat files, event streams) into the Merchant data warehouse.
• Develop and maintain orchestration workflows ensuring pipelines are observable, recoverable, and operating within agreed SLAs.
• Contribute substantively to platform infrastructure including environment configuration, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and alerting.
• Proactively identify and implement improvements to pipeline reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.

Data Quality, Governance and Engineering Standards adherence

• Implement and maintain data quality tests and monitoring at ingestion and integration layers to detect and resolve issues before downstream impact.
• Monitor, triage, and resolve production data issues, including root cause analysis and corrective/preventative actions.
• Maintain accurate and thorough documentation of data sources, pipeline logic, lineage, and known data issues in catalogue tools.
• Contribute actively to the definition and evolution of engineering standards including version control practices, testing frameworks, code reviews, and documentation norms.

Aligned, feasible, and well-designed data solutions

• Engage with the Business Advisory team during requirements scoping, providing credible technical input on feasibility, complexity, and effort.
• Collaborate with analytics engineers to ensure raw data layers meet transformation and modelling requirements.
• Contribute to architectural discussions and influence platform design decisions to improve scalability, reliability, and consistency across the data platform.

Team mentored and engineering capability developed

• Provide substantive guidance and code review to Specialist level engineers, supporting development of sound engineering judgment and higher-quality outputs.
• Mentor engineers on best practices in data pipeline design, testing, and operational reliability.
• Support capability growth within the team through knowledge sharing, pairing, and practical coaching on engineering standards and tooling.

Qualifications & Experience

✅ Required

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline. Postgraduate qualification advantageous.
• 6+ years of experience in data engineering in a production environment.
• Strong Python skills for pipeline development, with experience using orchestration tools such as Airflow or Prefect.
• Advanced SQL and solid understanding of data warehouse platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or equivalent).
• Experience independently designing and building data integrations from multiple heterogeneous source system types.
• Solid working knowledge of transformation tools (dbt or similar) and an ability to engage credibly with the analytics engineering layer.
• Experience implementing data quality frameworks and pipeline monitoring in a production environment.
• Demonstrated ability to own significant engineering workstreams from design through deployment.

Key Competencies

• Analysing and forming opinions
• Accuracy
• Devotion to Quality
• Results Oriented
• Cooperation
• Providing feedback
• Creativity
• Advanced SQL & Data Modelling: Designs efficient, scalable data models and writes complex SQL for large-scale analytical datasets
• Data Pipeline Engineering: Builds and maintains robust ETL/ELT pipelines across batch and streaming data sources
• Data Platform Architecture: Understands cloud data warehouse structures and distributed data processing systems
• Data Quality & Governance: Implements testing, validation, and lineage to ensure trusted and consistent data
• DevOps for Data Systems: Applies CI/CD, version control, monitoring, and observability to data pipelines and platforms
• Payment Systems Understanding: Interprets payment transaction flows and structures for accurate data integration and analysis

Ready to build and scale data platforms at Lesaka Merchant?

Apply now or share this opportunity with a colleague who would be a great fit.

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