Lead Data Engineer at Absa South Africa

Job Summary

• To provide expert advice and support in practice formulation and associated best practice in the implementation of technical services and improvement tactics; enabling the provision of specialist expertise.

Core Responsibilities

• Strategy and Roadmap: Defining the data engineering vision, roadmap, and technology stack (e.g., cloud platforms, data lakes/warehouses) aligned with business objectives.
• Team Leadership: Hiring, mentoring, and managing high-performing teams, fostering a culture of technical excellence and agile methodology.
• Data Architecture & Pipeline Design: Overseeing the design, implementation, and maintenance of scalable, high-performance ETL/ELT pipelines for structured and unstructured data.
• Governance and Compliance: Ensuring robust data governance, security, and compliance with regulations like POPIA, GDPR, and ISO 27001.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Partnering with Data Science, Analytics, Product, and IT teams to deliver reliable data products and support AI initiatives.
• Operational Excellence: Managing budgets, vendor relationships, cloud costs, and establishing SLAs/SLOs for data availability.

Required Qualifications and Skills

• Experience: 8–10+ years in Data Engineering, with 3–5+ years in leadership positions.
• Technical Skills: Deep expertise in SQL, data warehousing, ETL/ELT pipeline construction, and big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Airflow). Proficiency in cloud platforms (Azure or AWS), Snowflake/Databricks, SQL, and programming languages like Python or Java
• Data Modeling: Extensive experience in data modeling, schema design, and performance tuning of large datasets.
• Infrastructure & Tools: Knowledge of data orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow), and DevOps/DataOps principles
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science/IT, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field. 

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Manufacturing, Engineering and Technology (Required)

End Date: March 19, 2026