Senior Data Platform Engineer - AI-Driven, Flexible Hours

LexisNexis Legal; Cape Town; Hybrid; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthy work-life balance

Shared parental leave

Study assistance

Sabbaticals

Job summary

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and operation of scalable data platforms and services. You will work with analysts, data scientists, and engineers to deliver reliable data solutions and shape the future of the Data Engineering function, leveraging AI-assisted development practices.

You will mentor engineers, own data system design decisions, and drive performance improvements across data pipelines and APIs in a

Qualifications

• Deep proficiency in Python for building scalable applications, pipelines, or services.
• Strong SQL skills with capabilities to design schemas and optimize queries.
• Experience developing APIs and services, including Databricks and Terraform.
• Significant experience in data/backend engineering, owning end-to-end systems.
• Ability to make sound architectural and trade-off decisions.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, collaborative team.
• Experience working with AI-assisted development tools.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, build, and maintenance of data pipelines and backend services using Python.
• Write efficient 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

SQL

API development

Mentoring

AI-assisted development

Data engineering

Tools

Databricks

Terraform

Job description

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and operation of scalable data platforms and services. You will work with analysts, data scientists, and engineers to deliver reliable data solutions and shape the future of the Data Engineering function, leveraging AI-assisted development practices.

You will mentor engineers, own data system design decisions, and drive performance improvements across data pipelines and APIs in a