Lead Data Lab Engineer at Shoprite Group of Companies

Job Objectives    

•  Maintain a clear and aligned vision and mission statement for the data and acting as key input to the strategic direction of the division.
•  Analyse and understand the functional business requirements as defined by the Business Analysts, owners and other stakeholders as input to understanding various stakeholders impacted by activities related to the datalab.
•  Maintain technical architecture and technical documentation not residing with the architecture team.
•  Ensure team members follow best practices and establish procedures for DevSecOps.
•  Provide strategic facilitation that culminates a short and long term roadmap with clear deliverable description, expectations, timings.
•  Present the latest projects, development patterns and techniques in knowledge sharing and community of practice sessions.
•  Facilitate daily team standup sessions and ensure Sprint tasks are updated daily.
•  Facilitate Sprint backlog grooming, planning and reviews.
•  Initiate meetings and/or attend other meetings with key stakeholders to establish requirements and provide feedback.
•  Provide consolidated weekly feedback on project statuses, incidents and delivery estimates.
•  Ensure all team members and stakeholders commit their work to source control.
•  Ensure alignment of functional areas, key performance areas and establishing aligned, measurable and clear key performance indicators and development plans for all team members.
•  Identify skill gaps and training needs of team members.
•  Facilitate hackathon, competitions and projects with students and other groups as identified.
•  Stay up to date with the latest technology stacks, patterns and trends. Take ownership to gain knowledge of the retail environment and share that knowledge across the team

Qualifications    

• Relevant Degree in Information Systems, B.Sc Computer Science or equivalent  (essential).
• Relevant Post Graduate Degree in Information Systems, B.Sc Computer Science or equivalent  (beneficial).

Experience    

•  +5 years experience i n a Senior Data Engineering or equivalent role, managing or providing guidance to technology architecture frameworks, policies, procedures and guidelines  (essential)

 Experience specific requirements:

• Business Intelligence (BI Developer with knowledge of traditional Data Warehouse concepts).
• Data Engineering skills (big data, Hadoop, Spark).
• AWS (EMR, S3, Athena, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway).
• Solid understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
• User requirements analysis.
• Solution architecture design.
• Strong SQL skills, particularly on big data.

 Experience within the FMCG, retail sector or similar  (preferred).

•  A proven track record of managing a Data lab/engineering team, delivering within the functional domains of BI, data engineering, SDLC, user requirements analysis, solution architecture design, SQL and big data, as described above  (essential).

Knowledge and Skills    

•  Demonstrable knowledge of technological and data practices within the FMCG, retail sector, understanding of the data and development execution  (preferred).
•  Exposure to statutory requirements, applying and monitoring relevant laws, regulations and best practices as they relate to Big data, technology architecture and development  (preferred).