SENIOR DATA ENGINEER (SQL – Essential)

SRG Recruitment; South Africa; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

SRG Recruitment is seeking an experienced Data Engineer to own the design, development, and operation of ELT pipelines and curated data products. You will drive Snowflake-based modelling across layers, lead ingestion of new data sources, and define data quality and observability standards.

Collaborating with Analytics, Data Science, Platform, and Software engineers, you will optimise cost, performance, and storage, while guiding the team and ensuring scalable data solutions across domains.

Qualifications

• 5–9 years in data engineering with end-to-end ownership.
• Deep SQL and Python for building data pipelines.
• Hands-on Snowflake with performance tuning and cost control.
• Advanced dbt usage including macros and testing.
• Cloud experience (AWS/Azure), and IaC with Terraform.
• Fluent SDLC practices (CI/CD, Git).
• Experience with data orchestration tools (OpenFlow).
• Data quality, observability, and monitoring in production.
• Mentoring engineers and raising technical standards.
• Lead migrations to modern cloud data stacks; platform patterns.
• Exposure to regulated data domains; open-source contributions.

Responsibilities

• Own design, development, and operation of ELT pipelines and data products.
• Set modelling approach across Snowflake staging to data mart layers.
• Lead ingestion and exposure of new data sources from discovery to production.
• Define data quality standards, monitoring, and observability.
• Drive cost efficiency, query performance, and storage optimisation in Snowflake.
• Own schema evolution, data lineage, and documentation across domains.
• Contribute to platform standards, tooling, and architecture with leads.
• Lead production support, on-call rotations, incident response, and postmortems.
• Mentor Level 1/2 engineers through code reviews and guidance.
• Collaborate with Analytics Engineers, Data Scientists, Platform Engineers, and others.
• Champion automation and AI-assisted development for faster delivery.
• Evaluate modern data/AI approaches and influence adoption.

Skills

SQL

Python

Snowflake

dbt

Cloud platforms

OpenFlow

Data orchestration

Terraform

CI/CD

Data quality

Mentoring

Tools

Git

Job description

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Owning the design, development, and long-term operation of ELT pipelines and curated data products across one or more domains
• Setting the modelling approach across staging, intermediate, and data mart layers inSnowflake, and ensuring reusable, well-tested patterns are followed by the team
• Leading the data ingestion and exposure of new data sources for major products, features, and business initiatives, from discovery through to production
• Defining and evolving data quality, monitoring, and observability standards used across the team
• Driving cost efficiency, query performance, and storage optimisation within Snowflake,including warehouse strategy, clustering, and access patterns
• Owning schema evolution, data lineage, and documentation for your domain, and setting the expectation for how these are handled across the platform
• Contributing to platform standards, tooling, and architectural direction alongside Lead Engineers and the Platform team
• Leading production support for your domain, including on-call rotation, incident response, and postmortems
• Mentoring Level 1 and Level 2 engineers through code review, pairing, and technical guidance, and supporting their growth
• Partnering with Analytics Engineers, Data Analysts, Data Scientists, AI/ML Engineers, Platform Engineers, and Software Engineers to shape and deliver end-to-end data solutions
• Championing automation and AI-assisted development techniques to improve pipeline quality, documentation, and delivery speed
• Continuously evaluating modern data and AI-driven approaches, and influencing those that are invested in

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS:

• 5–9 years’ experience in data engineering, with a track record of owning production systems end-to-end
• Deep SQL and strong Python experience, with the ability to design as well as build data pipelines
• Substantial hands-on experience with Snowflake, including query profiling, warehouse strategy, RBAC, cost management, clustering, and performance tuning
• Advanced dbt experience, including custom macros, packages, incremental strategies, testing frameworks, and multi-project or mesh patterns
• Solid experience with cloud platforms, particularly AWS (and / or Azure),including core services such as S3, Lambda, IAM, and networking fundamentals
• Fluency within a mature SDLC, including Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and Git-based collaboration
• Experience withdata orchestration tools(Openflow or similar) at a design and standards-setting level
• Demonstrated experiencedesigning and operating data quality, observability, and monitoring frameworks in production
• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising the technical standard of a team
• Ability tolead technical discussionswith engineering, analytics, and business stakeholders and translate ambiguity into a plan
• Experienceleading a migration or modernisation initiative from a legacy platform onto a modern cloud data stack
• Experiencedesigning platform-level patterns(data contracts, shared macros/packages, reference architectures)
• Familiarity with analytics, experimentation, or AI/ML data workloads operating at scale
• Exposure to regulated data domains(iGaming, financial services, healthcare) and their compliance requirements
• Contributions to open-source tooling, technical writing, conference talks, or internal engineering communities

Correspondence will only be conducted with short listed candidates. Should you not hear from us within 14 days then please consider your application as unsuccessful.