Senior Data Engineer

Kohort; Bellville; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Employee Share Scheme

Income protection and Life cover

Wellbeing rewards

Employee Assistance Program

Job summary

Kohort is seeking a Senior Software Developer with a data engineering focus to join our remote-first team on the ground floor of a fast-growing startup. You will ensure petabyte-scale gaming data flows reliably from ingestion to insight, collaborating with data scientists, product managers, and other developers to build and maintain scalable pipelines and backend systems powering ML-driven analytics.

You will lead design and implementation of data pipelines, enforce data quality and

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building production systems, ideally data-intensive ones.
• Experience in gaming or Adtech is a bonus.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain reliable, scalable data pipelines that ingest, transform and serve large volumes of gaming data to ML models and customer-facing platform.
• Build validation, monitoring and observability to keep data trustworthy.
• Lead scoping, planning and estimation of new features and unblock the team.
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks across pipelines and backend services.
• Grow knowledge of game analytics and the tech stack in use.

Skills

Python

Polars

SQL

Data Modeling

Distributed Systems

APIs

Cloud Platforms

Container Orchestration

TypeScript

Job description

About Kohort

Kohort is the leading machine learning platform for mobile gaming user acquisition, optimisation, and financial planning. We provide game studios with investment-grade LTV predictions using petabyte-scale data and machine learning.

We are a group of gaming and data experts from King, Sensor Tower, Tripledot, Mistplay, Bloomberg and Football Radar. Our clients range from large, listed developers and publishers to up-and-coming start-ups building at the cutting edge of mobile gaming.

We add value to customers by helping them optimise UA spend on a day-to-day basis and then creating financial plans to accomplish strategic finance goals – from VC raises to IPO prep.

Our platform is investment grade; to date, we are the analytics partners of tier-1 VCs such as Index and CVC, and managed $8bn in deal value.

Why Kohort

• Career acceleration: We are accelerating as only a startup can. Join us in a zero-politics, no-drama, high-energy, impact-focused environment on the ground floor.
• Do the defining work of your career: We are working on a $6bn problem. That’s how much UA spend is wasted in mobile gaming each year. Did that make your blood boil? Sounds crazy? Wasteful? Let’s fix it together.
• We live and breathe gaming: You’ll get to work with the biggest game studios and on the biggest gaming PE and VC deals.

Your Role

As a Senior Software Developer with a data engineering focus, you’ll be at the heart of our data platform, ensuring that petabyte-scale gaming data flows reliably from ingestion to insight. You’ll work alongside data scientists, product managers, and fellow developers to build and maintain the pipelines and backend systems that power our ML-driven analytics.

• Data Pipelines: Design, build and maintain reliable, scalable pipelines that ingest, transform and serve large volumes of gaming data to our ML models and customer-facing platform.
• Data Quality: Build the validation, monitoring and observability that keep our data trustworthy – investment-grade predictions depend on it.
• Lead: Take responsibility for scoping, planning and estimating new features and unblocking and enabling the team to deliver quality products.
• Performance Optimisation: Identify and resolve bottlenecks across pipelines and backend services to build and maintain a high-performing platform.
• Learn: Proactively grow your knowledge of the game analytics domain and the tech stack we use now and could use in future.

We are a pre-Series A startup. So we know our domain and the problem we solve, but we want your help in getting there. Part of this role is being a startup operator, executing your work and helping build the company simultaneously.

Requirements

• Location: Remote-first (Cape Town), with access to in-office collaboration and several company-wide gatherings throughout the year.
• Experience: 5+ years of hands‑on experience building production systems, ideally data‑intensive ones. Experience in gaming or Adtech is a bonus.

Technical Proficiency:

• Expertise in Python is a must; experience with TypeScript is a bonus.
• Strong experience designing and building data engineering pipelines: ingestion, transformation (ETL/ELT), orchestration and scheduling.
• Hands‑on experience with Polars for high-performance data processing is a must (or strong experience with a similar dataframe library).
• Strong SQL and data modelling skills, with a deep understanding of both OLTP and OLAP databases, data warehousing and scalable architectures.
• Experience with systems design and architecture, database design and API design.
• Experience processing large datasets with distributed, batch or streaming frameworks is a bonus.
• Experience with AI coding assistants and a strong desire to learn how to use them effectively.
• Good familiarity with container orchestration and cloud platforms.

Mindset and Soft Skills:

• A proactive, self‑driven attitude with a penchant for problem‑solving in a fast‑paced startup environment.
• A pragmatic, outcome‑oriented approach and a passion for clean, maintainable code and reliable data.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with the ability to work with cross‑functional teams and senior management.

What you’ll receive

• Competitive salary
• Employee Share Scheme
• Income protection and Life cover
• Wellbeing rewards
• Employee Assistance Program