Lead Data Engineer: Architect Scalable Pipelines

Barloworld Equipment; South Africa; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Barloworld Equipment seeks a Lead Data Engineer to deliver complex, production-grade data engineering solutions while providing technical leadership across the team. You will ensure scalable, secure pipelines, platforms, and models aligned with governance and enterprise strategy.

You will mentor engineers and drive engineering excellence. You will also translate requirements into high-level designs, build detailed technical specs, and enforce standards and best practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in a relevant field.
• Extensive hands-on experience in production data engineering environments.
• Proven experience designing and supporting data warehouses, lakehouses, or analytics platforms.
• Strong experience with Azure Synapse and Snowflake, with a preference for Snowflake.
• Experience with CI/CD, Git, and automated data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development, and optimisation of scalable data pipelines and platforms.
• Provide technical leadership and act as final escalation point for complex data engineering decisions.
• Define, document, and enforce data engineering standards, patterns, and best practices.
• Ensure high quality, reliable, and cost-efficient data solutions.
• Mentor data engineers through code reviews, design sessions, and technical guidance.
• Ensure data solutions comply with security, governance and architectural standards.
• Collaborate closely with analytics, BI, platform, and business stakeholders.
• Translate functional requirements to high level design and build technical specifications documents.
• Develop robust, scalable Azure Synapse and Snowflake-based data pipelines.
• Maintain high-quality SQL, Python, and Spark code.
• Document engineering standards and architectural patterns.
• Improve platform stability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Elevate data engineering capability and consistency across the team.
• Provide trusted, production-ready datasets supporting analytics and decision-making.

Skills

Advanced SQL

Python

Technical leadership

Architectural thinking

Problem solving

Stakeholder communication

Quality and governance

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field

Equivalent practical experience considered

Tools

Azure Synapse

Snowflake

Job description

Barloworld Equipment seeks a Lead Data Engineer to deliver complex, production-grade data engineering solutions while providing technical leadership across the team. You will ensure scalable, secure pipelines, platforms, and models aligned with governance and enterprise strategy.

You will mentor engineers and drive engineering excellence. You will also translate requirements into high-level designs, build detailed technical specs, and enforce standards and best practices.