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.
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.
Data Platform & Engineering
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.
Collaboration & Mentorship
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.
10+ years in data engineering or related field
Strong SQL, MS Fabric, Data Factory, Power BI
Cloud platform experience (AWS/Azure)
Modern data stack & orchestration tools experience
Strong data modeling, system design, and production pipeline experience
Real-time streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub)
Infrastructure as Code
Machine learning data pipelines
Data governance, security, compliance
Team leadership / technical lead experience
Sabenza iT Recruitment is a Level 2 BBBEE company with more than 23 years of expertise in Information Technology recruitment. Our team comprises 20 recruiters dedicated to providing top-notch services in recruiting for sectors such as SAP, IT Developers, and IT Security, among others. Sabenza iT is proud to be a wholly South African-owned company.
