ML Engineer — Data Pipelines & Production ML

The Talent Room; George; On-site; ZAR 600,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

The Talent Room is seeking a senior ML/Data Engineer in George, Western Cape to design and own the data infrastructure powering the Data Science team, ensuring clean, reliable, well-structured data.

You will build feature pipelines and training datasets, maintain Snowflake assets for AI workloads, collaborate to align on platform standards, and develop scalable ML deployment pipelines with monitoring and governance. This role requires 5+ years in ML Eng or Data Eng and strong Python/SQL skills.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in ML Engineering, Data Engineering or a combined role.
• Strong Python for pipeline development and ML workflows.
• SQL proficiency for data investigation, transformation and validation.
• Experience with Azure cloud services and Snowflake.
• CI/CD pipeline development and version control (Git).
• Docker and containerisation for ML and data workloads.
• Model monitoring, drift detection and observability practices.
• Awareness of data governance and regulatory requirements (POPIA, FAIS context).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production development practices.

Responsibilities

• Design and build feature pipelines and training datasets that support model development and validation.
• Build and maintain high-quality data assets in Snowflake that serve AI and analytical workloads.
• Collaborate with Data Engineering to align on platform standards without absorbing core modernisation backlog.
• Develop scalable feature engineering capabilities and contribute to feature management best practices.
• Ensure data pipelines supporting model training and inference are reliable, monitored and well-documented.
• Apply awareness of data governance and regulatory obligations when building and managing data assets used in AI systems.
• Validate data quality and ensure model inputs align with agreed business definitions.
• Partner with Data Scientists to productionise machine learning models and AI solutions.
• Design, build and maintain ML deployment pipelines and model serving infrastructure.
• Implement CI/CD practices for machine learning workflows and automated model delivery.
• Manage model versioning, experiment tracking and reproducible deployments.
• Monitor deployed models for performance, data drift, reliability and operational health.
• Ensure model outputs, data lineage and deployment decisions are auditable.
• Contribute to responsible AI practices - explainability, monitoring and model risk controls.

Skills

Python

SQL

Azure

Snowflake

CI/CD

Docker

Model monitoring

Feature engineering

Data governance

Production deployment

Tools

Databricks

dbt

Git

Job description

The Talent Room is seeking a senior ML/Data Engineer in George, Western Cape to design and own the data infrastructure powering the Data Science team, ensuring clean, reliable, well-structured data.

You will build feature pipelines and training datasets, maintain Snowflake assets for AI workloads, collaborate to align on platform standards, and develop scalable ML deployment pipelines with monitoring and governance. This role requires 5+ years in ML Eng or Data Eng and strong Python/SQL skills.