Data Engineer / Data Architect - Lesaka (FinTech) at Lesaka Technologies

Are you ready to design and scale world-class data infrastructure in a fast-growing fintech environment? Join Lesaka, a leader in financial technology, and play a pivotal role in enabling data-driven decision-making, supporting analytics and AI initiatives, and ensuring our data systems meet the highest standards of reliability, security, and compliance.

• This role combines hands-on engineering with architectural leadership, working closely with product, analytics, and compliance teams to deliver scalable, secure, and future-proof data solutions.

Why This Role Matters
You will:

• Design and maintain scalable, secure, high-performance data architectures
• Build robust ETL/ELT pipelines for batch and streaming data
• Enable analytics, BI, and AI workloads through reliable data platforms
• Ensure regulatory compliance and data governance for sensitive financial data

What You’ll Do
Data Architecture & Design

• Design and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performance data architectures
• Define data models, schemas, and standards across transactional and analytical systems
• Architect data lakes, data warehouses, and real-time data pipelines
• Ensure alignment with fintech regulatory and compliance requirements

Data Engineering

• Build and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines for batch and streaming data
• Integrate data from internal systems, third-party APIs, and financial data providers
• Optimize data processing for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency
• Ensure data quality, consistency, and availability

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Develop and manage cloud-based data platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Implement infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD for data pipelines
• Monitor and troubleshoot data systems in production

Security & Governance

• Implement data security, access controls, encryption, and monitoring
• Support data governance, lineage, and metadata management
• Collaborate with compliance and risk teams on audits and regulatory needs

Collaboration & Leadership

• Work closely with product managers, analysts, and ML engineers
• Provide technical guidance and best practices for data usage
• Document architectures, workflows, and standards
• Mentor junior data engineers (if applicable)

Minimum Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or related roles
• Strong proficiency in SQL and data modelling (dimensional and/or normalized)
• Experience building data pipelines using tools such as Airflow, dbt, Spark, or similar
• Strong programming skills in Python, Scala, or Java
• Hands-on experience with cloud data services (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks)
• Experience with both batch and streaming data systems (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub)
• Solid understanding of data security, privacy, and governance principles

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in fintech, banking, payments, or financial services
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks (PCI DSS, SOC 2, GDPR)
• Experience supporting analytics, BI, and machine learning workloads
• Knowledge of event-driven and real-time data architectures
• Prior experience leading architectural decisions or data platform migrations

Core Technical Competencies

• Data Architecture & Modelling – Scalable, resilient designs for transactional and analytical workloads
• Data Engineering & Pipelines – Reliable batch and streaming pipelines with strong data quality
• Cloud & Platform Engineering – Proficient in AWS, GCP, or Azure with IaC and CI/CD
• Programming & Querying – Advanced SQL and Python/Scala/Java expertise
• Data Security & Governance – Encryption, access control, compliance readiness