Senior Data Engineer

About us

LifeCheq is a fintech company changing how South Africans manage their personal

finances. Our platform combines smart tech, deep financial expertise, and a unique

approach to financial advice. We're growing rapidly, backed by major investors including

Futuregrowth, African Rainbow Capital, and Naspers Foundry.

We’re building a deeply data-driven platform and are looking for technically sharp engineers

to help push its foundations to the next level.

What you'll do

You’ll take ownership of our analytics data layer and work closely with our Platform and ML

squads. Your job is to build a fast, clean, and reliable system that integrates backend data

from an event-sourced architecture, external services, and JSON-based event logs—then

serves performant, well-modelled views to analysts, ML pipelines, dashboards, and even the

product frontend.

Early work will include:

• Designing a real-time ingestion pipeline for event-sourced data streams and JSON logs
• on S3, and implementing it for low-latency performance.
• Defining a clear semantic model and restructuring existing views into a maintainable,
• well-layered architecture.
• Optimising Delta Lake performance to deliver near–real-time data (<5 minutes) on a
• reasonable compute budget.
• Formalising schemas for core entities and building structured views that can be safely
• used across analytics, reporting, and application layers.
• Cleaning up pipeline logic to reduce latency, improve readability, and lower cognitive
• overhead.

This work is central to unlocking productivity across the business. Success looks like an

analytics foundation that’s predictable, fast, and easy to extend—powering everything from

dashboards to ML models. As the platform scales, there will be opportunities to extend this

foundation—designing for higher data volumes, streaming complexity, and broader cross-

team data needs.

Who we're looking for

You’re a strong engineer who prioritises fundamentals and performance. You deeply understand

database internals, query optimisation, and distributed systems. You're not tied to specific

tech stacks - your technical depth and ability to reason from first principles matter more

than specific experience with particular tools. This isn’t a role for someone looking

to grow into seniority - it’s for someone already operating at a high level of technical autonomy.

You have:

• Excellent SQL skills and deep understanding of databases
• (indexing, query optimisation, internals).
• Strong coding skills in Python, Clojure or Scala; your code is clean, efficient, and
• production-ready.
• Experience with distributed data processing technologies like Spark.
• A genuine interest in understanding the business and carefully modelling data
• for clarity and performance.
• A rigorous, analytical mindset—you identify bottlenecks proactively
• and design solutions thoughtfully.

This role suits someone with strong end-to-end design skills. You think clearly about

architecture, weigh trade-offs carefully, and implement pragmatic, well-reasoned solutions.

You’ll have real autonomy in how you approach problems—including the freedom to reshape

parts of the stack—while being expected to explain and motivate your decisions with clarity.

You enjoy working closely with both engineers and business stakeholders, and see

collaboration as essential to building systems that are both technically sound and practically

useful.

Bonus points

• Interest in functional programming and experience with Clojure, Scala, or related
• ecosystems.
• Track record of building clean systems in high-ownership environments like startups or
• small technical teams.
• Experience working with Databricks, Delta Lake, and AWS.
• Familiarity with Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools.

Working with us

LifeCheq values technical depth, autonomy, and clear thinking. You’ll be part of a small,

capable team that enjoys solving hard problems together and takes pride in doing things

properly. It’s a collaborative, engineering-driven environment where well-reasoned decisions

carry weight and where your ideas will be taken seriously. There’s plenty of room to shape

systems and standards—so long as they’re driven by sound reasoning and a clear-eyed

view of trade-offs.

This is a fully remote role, and we ask for availability during our core hours (10:00 - 16:00

GMT+2).