🚀 We’re Hiring: Principal Specialist – Data & Analytics Engineering
Lesaka Merchant | Merchant Data Department

Are you a highly skilled data engineering professional who thrives on designing scalable platforms, setting technical direction, and mentoring top talent?

Lesaka Merchant is looking for a Principal Specialist: Data & Analytics Engineering to lead the technical standards and architectural direction across our data platform — ensuring everything we build is robust, scalable, and built for long‑term success.

This is a senior player‑coach role for someone who combines deep technical expertise with leadership influence.

📍 Location: In‑person (Gauteng / Cape-Town)
📊 Reporting Line: Head of Data Engineering
👥 Direct Reports: None (Senior Individual Contributor)

💼 Purpose

The Principal Specialist: Data & Analytics Engineering is the technical authority within the Data Engineering team, responsible for shaping how data is engineered, transformed, and delivered across the Merchant Division.

This role ensures:

• High‑quality, scalable data architecture
• Consistent engineering standards and best practices
• Reliable, production‑grade data pipelines
• Alignment between engineering outputs and analytical needs
• Continuous improvement of the data platform

You are the technical conscience of the team — ensuring that every solution is built correctly, consistently, and sustainably.

🔍 Key Responsibility Areas

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own and define the end‑to‑end data platform architecture.
• Enforce engineering standards across pipelines, modelling, testing, CI/CD, and documentation.
• Lead architectural reviews and guide complex technical decisions.
• Identify and manage technical debt, scalability risks, and platform gaps.

Engineering Delivery

• Lead delivery of complex, high‑impact data engineering workstreams.
• Oversee multi‑source integrations and consolidation pipelines.
• Own analytics engineering practices — including transformation and semantic layers.
• Act as final technical reviewer for all production‑ready artefacts.
• Ensure alignment with Analytics & Insights for downstream consumption.

Mentorship & Capability Development

• Provide hands‑on technical mentorship to engineers.
• Lead code reviews, knowledge sharing, and best‑practice adoption.
• Support hiring and onboarding of new technical talent.
• Build and elevate team capability across data and analytics engineering.

🎓 Qualifications & Experience

Essential:
✔ Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
✔ 8+ years in data engineering and/or analytics engineering
✔ Proven experience as a technical lead or principal engineer
✔ Expertise in dbt or equivalent transformation tools
✔ Strong experience with cloud data platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks)
✔ Advanced Python (pipelines, orchestration, testing)
✔ Advanced SQL (optimisation, complex transformations)
✔ Strong data modelling expertise (Kimball, Data Vault, OBT)
✔ Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to stakeholders

Advantageous:
• Financial services or fintech experience
• Multi‑entity or post‑acquisition data environments
• Streaming/event‑driven architecture exposure
• Data governance, lineage, and cataloguing tools

🧠 Key Competencies

Technical Mastery
Operates at the highest technical level across data and analytics engineering.

Standards Ownership
Defines and enforces consistent engineering and architectural standards.

Architectural Thinking
Designs scalable, maintainable systems for long‑term evolution.

Mentorship
Develops team capability through coaching, feedback, and guidance.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration
Partners effectively with analytics, data science, and business teams.

Delivery Ownership
Takes accountability for complex workstreams from design to production.

🌟 Our Values

At Lesaka Merchant, we are guided by four core values:

✔ Entrepreneurial Spirit – We innovate boldly and take ownership
✔ Integrity – We operate with honesty, trust, and transparency
✔ Collective Wisdom – We collaborate and leverage shared expertise
✔ Bias to Action – We execute with urgency and discipline

📌 Preference will be made to support EE / AA measures.

🔗 Ready to shape the future of data engineering at Lesaka Merchant?
Apply now — or share with a world‑class technical leader who thrives on building scalable, high‑impact data platforms.

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