Senior Data Platform Engineer — AI-Driven Backend & Pipelines

LexisNexis Risk Solutions; South Africa; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,600,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

wellbeing initiatives

shared parental leave

study assistance

sabbaticals

Job summary

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions seeks a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and operation of scalable data platforms powering critical business outcomes. You will collaborate with analysts, data scientists, and engineers to drive technical excellence and mentor teammates.

You will own data pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure, balancing performance and reliability while embracing AI-assisted development practices to deliver high-impact solutions.

Qualifications

• Deep proficiency in Python for building applications, pipelines, or services at scale.
• Strong SQL skills, writing performant queries, designing schemas, and optimizing for large or complex datasets.
• Significant experience working in a data engineering or backend engineering environment, including owning systems end-to-end.
• Demonstrated ability to make sound architectural and technical trade-off decisions.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, build, and maintenance of data pipelines and backend services using Python
• Write efficient, well-structured SQL for data extraction, transformation, and analysis, and set standards for query and schema design across the team
• Develop and maintain APIs and services (e.g. using FastAPI and SQLAlchemy) to expose data to internal and external consumers
• Own technical design decisions for data systems, balancing scalability, reliability, and maintainability
• Collaborate with data analysts, scientists, and other engineers to understand data needs and deliver reliable solutions
• Drive the design and upkeep of infrastructure supporting data workloads (containers, orchestration, provisioning)
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and improve the performance and reliability of existing data systems, including leading incident response and root-cause analysis where needed
• Mentor other engineers, lead code reviews, and help raise the technical bar across the team

Skills

Python programming

SQL proficiency

Data pipelines

API development

AI-assisted development

Mentoring engineers

Cloud & containers

Tools

FastAPI

SQLAlchemy

Job description

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions seeks a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and operation of scalable data platforms powering critical business outcomes. You will collaborate with analysts, data scientists, and engineers to drive technical excellence and mentor teammates.

You will own data pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure, balancing performance and reliability while embracing AI-assisted development practices to deliver high-impact solutions.