Senior Data Platform Engineer — AI-Driven Leadership

relx; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and operation of scalable data platforms and APIs. You will collaborate with data scientists and engineers to deliver high-impact solutions and mentor the team in AI-assisted development practices.

You will own data systems end-to-end, drive architectural decisions, and ensure reliability and scalability across backend services and data pipelines.

Qualifications

• Proficiency in Python for building scalable apps/pipelines.
• Strong SQL skills and ability to design schemas.
• Experience owning data systems end-to-end in a data/backend environment.
• Ability to make sound architectural trade-offs in a fast-moving team.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, collaborative setting.
• Experience building and maintaining APIs and services.
• Experience 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/schema design.
• Develop and maintain APIs/services (e.g. FastAPI/SQLAlchemy) to expose data.
• Own technical design decisions for data systems, balancing scalability and reliability.
• Collaborate with analysts, scientists, and engineers to understand data needs and deliver solutions.
• Drive infrastructure design for data workloads (containers, orchestration, provisioning).
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and improve performance and reliability of data systems; lead incident response.
• Mentor engineers, lead code reviews, raise the technical bar.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data pipelines

Data engineering

Mentoring

Backend development

FastAPI

SQLAlchemy

Tools

FastAPI

SQLAlchemy

APIs

Job description

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and operation of scalable data platforms and APIs. You will collaborate with data scientists and engineers to deliver high-impact solutions and mentor the team in AI-assisted development practices.

You will own data systems end-to-end, drive architectural decisions, and ensure reliability and scalability across backend services and data pipelines.