Lead Data Engineer for Scalable AI-Powered Platforms

Placements24; South Africa; On-site; ZAR 1,000,000 - 1,400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working hours

Wellbeing initiatives

Shared parental leave

Study assistance

Sabbaticals

Job summary

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg seeks a Senior Software Engineer to lead data platform design and operation. You will mentor engineers, shape the Data Engineering function, and apply AI-assisted development practices to deliver scalable, high-impact solutions.

You will collaborate with analysts, data scientists, and engineers to meet data needs, drive best practices, and ensure reliability across data systems and infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Deep proficiency in Python for building applications, pipelines, or services at scale.
• Strong SQL skills, writing performant queries, designing schemas, and optimizing for large or complex datasets.
• Significant experience in a data engineering or backend engineering environment, including owning systems end-to-end.
• Demonstrated ability to make sound architectural and technical trade-off decisions.
• Experience mentoring engineers and/or leading technical initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, build, and maintenance of data pipelines and backend services.
• Write efficient, well-structured SQL for data extraction, transformation, and analysis.
• Develop and maintain APIs and services (e.g. FastAPI, SQLAlchemy) to expose data.
• Own technical design decisions for data systems balancing scalability, reliability, and maintainability.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data engineering

APIs

AI-assisted development tools

Tools

FastAPI

SQLAlchemy

Job description

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg seeks a Senior Software Engineer to lead data platform design and operation. You will mentor engineers, shape the Data Engineering function, and apply AI-assisted development practices to deliver scalable, high-impact solutions.

You will collaborate with analysts, data scientists, and engineers to meet data needs, drive best practices, and ensure reliability across data systems and infrastructure.