Senior Data Engineer at Salt South Africa

About the Role

• You’re stepping in as the Senior Data Engineer who keeps everything running smoothly while the organisation levels up its entire data landscape.

Think of it as:

Architect + Mentor + Cloud Moderniser + Pipeline Whisperer + Migration Specialist

• You’ll be leading the move from older Microsoft BI tooling to a fully cloud-native, automated, scalable data platform. You’ll guide engineers, design better pipelines, instil modern standards, tune performance, and get everyone speaking the same technical language.
• And yes – you’ll get to play with a seriously cool stack: AWS, Snowflake, DBT, Python, serverless, orchestration, modern CI/CD, GitHub AI tooling… all the good stuff.

What You’ll Actually Do
(aka the reason you’re here)

Team Leadership

• Mentor data engineers, shape best practices, and guide technical decisions.
• Lead sprint planning, reviews, and code standards that future-you will actually appreciate.

Data Architecture

• Build and optimise scalable pipelines on Snowflake (AWS) with modern ELT patterns.
• Own the data model strategy: star schemas, naming consistency, clean logic – the works.

Cloud Integration & Modernisation

• Architect ingestion with Python, S3, Lambda, and cloud-native services.
• Lead the shift away from SSIS/SSAS toward a robust, future-proof setup.
• Guarantee continuity with minimal “oops” moments for the business.

Performance, Quality & Governance

• Tune warehouse performance like a pro.
• Implement data quality checks and observability dashboards.
• Ensure security, privacy, and compliance are always first-class citizens.

Collaboration

• Work alongside product, analytics, and business teams to deliver clean, trusted data.
• Bring clarity, calm, and leadership to fast-moving projects.

CI/CD & Automation

• Introduce and manage GitHub-based CI/CD for pipelines and transformations.
• Champion automation so the team spends less time fixing, more time innovating.

What You Bring

(Not a checklist – more like ingredients for success)

• Around 5+ years solving real data engineering problems in production.
• Experience leading or mentoring other engineers.
• Deep comfort with Python, SQL, AWS S3, Lambda, Snowflake, DBT, and data pipelines.
• Confidence working with legacy SQL Server environments while moving everything to modern cloud architectures.
• Experience with GitHub, version control, reviews, and AI‑assisted workflows.
• Bonus talents: Airflow/Prefect, Terraform, advanced AWS/Snowflake certification.
• A pragmatic, calm, “let’s build this well” mindset – not a “rewrite everything because it’s fun” mindset.
• A knack for explaining technical things without sounding like a decoder ring.