Senior Data Platform Engineer — Lead, Mentor & AI-Driven

RELX; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Wellbeing initiatives

Parental leave

Study assistance

Sabbaticals

Job summary

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions in Johannesburg is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design, development and operation of scalable data platforms and services that power critical business outcomes.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with analysts and data scientists, and apply AI-assisted development practices to deliver reliable, high-impact solutions while shaping the Data Engineering function.

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.
• Experience mentoring engineers and/or leading technical initiatives.
• Comfort working in a fast‑paced, collaborative team setting.
• Experience developing and maintaining APIs and services.
• Experience working with AI‑assisted development tools and supporting team adoption of AI capabilities.

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

SQL

Data engineering

Mentoring

APIs

AI tools

Tools

FastAPI

SQLAlchemy

Job description

LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions in Johannesburg is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the design, development and operation of scalable data platforms and services that power critical business outcomes.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with analysts and data scientists, and apply AI-assisted development practices to deliver reliable, high-impact solutions while shaping the Data Engineering function.