Lead Data Engineer — Cape Town (Onsite)

CV; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

CV (Christian Vision) in Cape Town is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to build and evolve data pipelines and infrastructure, and to lead the Data and Insights team.

The role focuses on clean, trustworthy data, scalable architecture, and collaboration with cross-functional teams to enable data-informed decisions.

Applicants should have 5+ years in data engineering, strong SQL and Python, and experience with cloud platforms.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of data engineering experience, including ETL/ELT design and leadership.
• Bachelor's degree in data engineering or related field.
• Strong SQL skills and Python or similar scripting language.
• Experience with cloud data platforms (Azure Data Factory, Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake).
• Knowledge of data warehousing, dimensional modeling, and workflows.
• Understanding of agentic systems and AI-driven data products is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with stakeholders to gather project requirements, define scope and priorities, and translate them into actionable technical plans.
• Lead, mentor, and support data engineers through regular team meetings, sprint and project reviews, fostering innovation, collaboration, and professional growth.
• Plan and manage project execution, maintaining ticketing systems and ensuring tasks are well-defined, prioritised, and resourced to meet objectives efficiently.
• Design, implement, and monitor automated data ingestion pipelines across diverse sources, ensuring quality, consistency, compliance, efficiency and reliability.
• Build and optimise ETL/ELT processes to prepare data for reporting, dashboards, and analytics, translating business logic into reusable transformation code and models.
• Collaborate with analysts and partners in mission initiatives and other cross-functional teams to define key metrics and data outputs that provide organisational value.
• Contribute to the design and continuous evolution of CV’s cloud-based data architecture, defining best practices for data storage, performance, and access control.
• Work closely with Infrastructure and Cybersecurity teams to ensure data platform security, scalability, and compliance with organisational and regulatory standards.
• Develop and maintain documentation for pipelines, schema designs, workflows, and project specifications, ensuring consistency with shared engineering standards and templates.
• Provide leadership in onboarding, cross-training, and knowledge sharing within the team to sustain operational excellence and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with the Applications, Governance and Cybersecurity teams and partners in Mission teams to ensure secure integrations and high-quality data delivery to support data-informed decision-making.
• As part of a global organisation, you will be required to collaborate across time zones, which may involve out-of-hours availability.

Skills

Data engineering

Leadership

SQL

Python

Education

Bachelor's degree in data engineering / data science or related

Tools

Azure Data Factory

Databricks

BigQuery

Snowflake

Docker

Git

Job description

CV (Christian Vision) in Cape Town is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to build and evolve data pipelines and infrastructure, and to lead the Data and Insights team.

The role focuses on clean, trustworthy data, scalable architecture, and collaboration with cross-functional teams to enable data-informed decisions.

Applicants should have 5+ years in data engineering, strong SQL and Python, and experience with cloud platforms.