Senior Data Engineer: Scalable Data Platforms & Mentorship

Derivco; Durban; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Derivco is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to own end-to-end data platforms, pipelines, and standards. You will design and operate scalable data solutions, mentor engineers, and partner with Analytics, Data Science, and Software teams to deliver robust data products.

The role focuses on building modern data platforms in Snowflake with dbt, AWS, and Airflow, driving quality, performance, and cost efficiency across production systems.

Qualifications

• 5-9 years' experience in Data Engineering with a proven track record of owning production data systems end-to-end.
• Deep expertise in SQL and strong proficiency in Python development.
• Extensive hands-on experience with Snowflake, including performance tuning, warehouse management, RBAC, clustering, and cost optimisation.
• Advanced experience with dbt, including custom macros, testing frameworks, incremental models, and reusable engineering patterns.
• Strong experience working with cloud platforms, particularly AWS, including services such as S3, Lambda, IAM, and networking fundamentals.
• Experience operating within mature software development environments, including CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and Git-based workflows.
• Experience with orchestration tools such as Openflow, Airflow, or similar technologies.
• Proven experience implementing and operating data quality, monitoring, and observability frameworks in production environments.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and elevate technical standards across a team.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Owning the design, development, and operation of scalable ELT pipelines and curated data products across one or more business domains.
• Defining and implementing data modelling approaches across staging, intermediate, and mart layers within Snowflake.
• Leading the onboarding and integration of new data sources to support strategic business initiatives and product development.
• Driving data quality, monitoring, and observability standards across the data platform.
• Optimising query performance, storage strategies, and cost efficiency within Snowflake.
• Managing schema evolution, data lineage, and technical documentation within your area of ownership.
• Contributing to platform architecture, engineering standards, and tooling alongside Lead Engineers and platform teams.
• Supporting production environments through incident management, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Mentoring Data Engineers through code reviews, technical coaching, and best practice adoption.
• Collaborating with Analytics Engineers, Data Scientists, AI/ML Engineers, Software Engineers, and business stakeholders to deliver end-to-end data solutions.
• Championing automation, AI-assisted development practices, and modern engineering approaches to improve delivery, quality, and efficiency.
• Evaluating emerging technologies and contributing to the future direction of Derivco's data platform.

Skills

SQL

Python

Snowflake

dbt

AWS

CI/CD

Terraform

Airflow

Data quality

Mentoring

Stakeholder mgmt

Tools

Openflow

Airflow

Snowflake

dbt

Terraform

Job description

Derivco is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to own end-to-end data platforms, pipelines, and standards. You will design and operate scalable data solutions, mentor engineers, and partner with Analytics, Data Science, and Software teams to deliver robust data products.

The role focuses on building modern data platforms in Snowflake with dbt, AWS, and Airflow, driving quality, performance, and cost efficiency across production systems.