Data Engineer
Nambiti Technologies
We are sourcing for a Data Engineer role.
Duties and Responsibilities
Contribute to the establishment and operation of the AI Centre of Excellence (AI CoE)
- Collaborate with executives to develop strategies that align with organisational imperatives.
- Partner with AI Champions, ICT, Data Scientists and AI/ML Engineers to integrate AI into operational workflows smoothly.
Data Ingestion & Integration
- Build scalable batch and streaming pipelines from internal and external sources (APIs, CDC, files, events).
- Implement schema evolution, late-arriving data handling, and idempotent ingestion.
- Set up connectors and jobs across cloud services, message queues (Kafka/Kinesis/Event Hubs), and integration tools.
Data Transformation & Modeling
- Design and maintain curated datasets (bronze/silver/gold) using ELT/ETL.
- Implement dimensional models, data vault, and/or lakehouse patterns as appropriate.
- Use transformation frameworks (e.g., dbt, Spark) with robust testing and documentation.
- Data Platform Engineering
- Build and operate data lakes / warehouses / lake houses (e.g., Delta Lake, BigQuery, Synapse).
- Manage storage formats and optimizations (Parquet/ORC, partitioning, compaction, etc).
- Implement cataloguing, lineage, and discovery (e.g., Unity Catalog, Purview, Data Catalogue).
Reliability, Observability & Quality
- Implement data testing (unit, expectations), monitoring (freshness, volume, schema, distribution), and alerting (e.g., Great Expectations, Soda, Monte Carlo).
- Establish SLAs/SLOs and incident response for data pipelines.
- Ensure reproducibility, versioning, and backfills with orchestration (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, Prefect).
Security, Governance & Compliance
- Apply data access controls (RBAC/ABAC), masking, tokenization, encryption at rest/in transit.
- Enforce data retention, lineage, and regulatory compliance (POPIA or industry-specific).
- Collaborate with Data Governance and Security teams on policies and audits.
Cost & Performance Optimization (FinOps)
- Monitor compute/storage spend and optimize partitioning, caching, spot/preemptible usage.
- Right-size warehouses/clusters and tune jobs for performance and cost efficiency.
Collaboration & Enablement
- Partner with Data Scientists/Analysts on feature engineering, model-ready tables, and MLOps handoffs.
- Create self-service patterns, templates, and documentation to accelerate downstream teams.
- Contribute to platform standards, reusable components, and developer experience.
- Provide mentorship to emerging data engineers
Education, Skills and Experience
- A diploma or bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience) is required.
- 6+ years in Data Engineering or similar roles (Software Engineer with data focus, ETL Developer).
- Experience with Lakehouse platforms (Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Synapse/OneLake).
- Hands-on with Terraform/Bicep/CloudFormation for infrastructure-as-code.
- Familiarity with MLOps (feature stores, model registries, batch/stream scoring integration).
- Proven experience building and operating production-grade data pipelines