This opportunity at FirstRand, a leading financial institution in South Africa, seeks a skilled Data Engineer to join their dynamic team in Johannesburg. You will be instrumental in shaping and optimising the organisation's data infrastructure, ensuring seamless data flow and accessibility for various cross-functional teams. If you are a seasoned data pipeline builder with a passion for optimising data systems and constructing them from the ground up, this role offers a chance to make a significant impact.

About the Role

The core of this position revolves around maintaining and enhancing the data and data pipeline architecture. You will be responsible for optimising data flow and collection processes, directly supporting software developers, database architects, data analysts, and data scientists in their data initiatives. A key aspect will be ensuring that the data delivery architecture remains consistent and robust across all ongoing projects. This is a self-directed role, requiring you to comfortably manage the data needs of multiple teams, systems, and products simultaneously. You'll have the opportunity to re-design or optimise existing data architecture to lay the foundation for future products and data-driven strategies.

Your responsibilities will extend to the day-to-day maintenance, improvement, cleaning, and manipulation of data within the business's operational and analytics databases. This ensures a deep understanding of data, aids in implementing database requirements, analysing performance trends, and troubleshooting any emerging issues. An expert-level proficiency in SQL development is essential, as you'll provide critical support to the Data and Analytics teams in database design, data flow analysis, and other related activities. Furthermore, this role plays a pivotal part in the development and deployment of cutting-edge big data platforms designed for advanced analytics and complex data processing.

Your key duties will encompass a broad spectrum of data engineering responsibilities:

• **Pipeline Architecture:** Create and maintain optimal data pipeline architectures, assembling large, complex datasets that align with functional and non-functional business requirements.
• **Process Improvement:** Identify, design, and implement internal process enhancements, focusing on automating manual tasks, optimising data delivery mechanisms, and re-designing infrastructure for improved scalability.
• **Data Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL):** Build and manage the infrastructure essential for the efficient extraction, transformation, and loading of data from a diverse range of sources, leveraging SQL and big data technologies.
• **Analytics Tool Implementation:** Implement analytics tools that effectively utilise the data pipeline to generate actionable insights into critical business areas such as customer acquisition, operational efficiency, and other key performance indicators.
• **Stakeholder Collaboration:** Work closely with stakeholders, including executive leadership, product teams, data specialists, and design teams, to address data-related technical challenges and support their specific data infrastructure needs.
• **Data Security and Governance:** Maintain data integrity and security across national boundaries by managing data across multiple data centres, adhering to strict governance and quality standards.
• **Tooling for Data Teams:** Develop and implement data tools for analytics and data scientist team members, empowering them to build and enhance products and drive innovation within the industry.
• **Innovation and Research:** Lead innovation by exploring new technologies, benchmarking solutions, making informed recommendations, and implementing big data technologies for existing and future platforms.
• **Database Management:** Develop and implement scripts for database maintenance, monitoring, and performance tuning. Design and develop scalable ETL packages (e.g., using Abinitio) to populate databases from various source systems and create necessary aggregates.
• **Platform Support:** Oversee large-scale data Hadoop platforms and support the rapidly growing data volumes within the organisation.
• **Data Migration and Storage:** Enable and execute data migrations across different databases and servers (e.g., SQL Server to Oracle), and define and implement data stores based on system and business requirements.
• **Quality Assurance:** Conduct thorough testing and validation to ensure the accuracy of data transformations and verification processes used in machine learning models.
• **Ad-hoc Analysis:** Perform ad-hoc analyses of data stored in business databases, writing SQL scripts, stored procedures, functions, and views to extract insights and troubleshoot issues.
• **Data Modelling:** Analyse complex data elements, systems, data flows, dependencies, and relationships to contribute to conceptual, physical, and logical data models.
• **Mentorship:** Support junior data engineering personnel by creating databases optimised for performance, implementing schema changes, and upholding data architecture standards.

This role is integral to FirstRand's data strategy, contributing to informed decision-making and improved business performance through advanced data engineering practices and robust data governance.

Qualifications:

• The Data Engineer must have a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Applied Mathematics, Engineering, or any other technology related field. An equivalent of the same in working experience is also accepted for the position.
• 5 years of experience in managing financial services data, especially as a data architect
• Advanced data analysis skills using Excel, Abinitio,SQL and reporting tools to import, analyse and report on data
• Relative certifications

Important Closing Date Note

Take note that applications will not be accepted on the below date and onwards, kindly submit applications ahead of the closing date indicated below.