Remote Principal Data Engineer Lead Pipelines

Placements24; East London; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Health insurance

Flexible working hours

Professional development & training

Remote work environment

Conferences & training

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a highly experienced Principal Data Engineer to design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and data warehousing solutions. This fully remote SA role offers opportunities to lead data initiatives, mentor engineers, and drive best practices in data architecture and governance.

You will work with AWS/Azure/GCP, Spark, Hadoop, Hive, and Kafka to deliver robust data platforms that empower critical decision-making across the organization.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data engineering or a related role.
• Proven experience designing and implementing large-scale data architectures.
• Proficiency in SQL and experience with various database technologies.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Scala, or Java.
• Extensive experience with cloud data services (AWS Redshift, S3, EMR; Azure Data Lake; GCP BigQuery).
• Experience with data modeling and warehousing concepts.
• Strong understanding of data governance & security principles.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize scalable data pipelines and ETL/ELT processes.
• Develop and maintain data warehousing solutions and data lake architectures.
• Ensure data quality, integrity, and reliability across all data systems.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to data engineering teams.
• Architect and implement data solutions on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Work with Spark, Hadoop, and Kafka to handle big data workloads.
• Develop and enforce data governance policies and standards.
• Collaborate with data scientists and analysts to meet data needs.
• Automate data infrastructure operations and monitoring.
• Stay abreast of emerging data engineering technologies and best practices.

Skills

SQL

Python

Scala

Java

Leadership

Education

Master's or Ph.D. in CS/Engineering

Tools

Apache Spark

Hadoop

Kafka

Hive

S3

Redshift

BigQuery

Azure Data Lake

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a highly experienced Principal Data Engineer to design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and data warehousing solutions. This fully remote SA role offers opportunities to lead data initiatives, mentor engineers, and drive best practices in data architecture and governance.

You will work with AWS/Azure/GCP, Spark, Hadoop, Hive, and Kafka to deliver robust data platforms that empower critical decision-making across the organization.