Engineering Team Lead (Data Engineering) - Takealot

takealot.com, a leading South African online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Engineering Team Lead (Data Engineering) to join our team in Cape Town.

We are a young, dynamic, hyper growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us. We offer a market related, Total Remuneration Package which allows full flexibility according to your needs, a great work environment and a promise that you won’t be bored as long as you are prepared for a challenge and want to build something great.

This position reports to the Engineering Director (Data):

At Takealot, our Data Engineering team is focused on designing, building, and troubleshooting data processing systems that are secure, reliable, fault-tolerant, scalable, and efficient. We are currently working towards building a completely new Real-Time Event-Driven Architecture for data processing using open-source and server-less technologies such as Debezium, BigQuery, Flink, Kafka, among others. This new Lakehouse will serve as the central source of truth, which multiple internal users will have access to, to drive their daily/monthly/quarterly decisions. Takealot is growing quickly, which brings a number of unique and interesting challenges. As such, data within the organization is also growing quickly. This brings a lot of opportunities for you to shape the tools, technologies, and culture around data in the company.

Your responsibilities will include the following:

• Lead, execute and maintain the Data Engineering strategy that will fit into our Group Data Strategy based on an event-driven and real-time architecture (Kappa Architecture)
• Architecting and implementing technical solutions to support scale and security initiatives
• Mentoring and coaching of data best practices within the organization. Driving the adoption of these best practices to ensure data hygiene.
• Defines standards and frameworks with regards to best practices in the Data Engineering and Software Engineering realm.
• Define and implement standard development methodologies to ensure that the team is using best practices for coding, efficiency, version control, QA and release management.
• Oversee operational support
• Participates in the project management estimation process.
• Manage backlogs and expectations with stakeholders.
• Identifies and provides input to new technology opportunities that will have an impact on the enterprise wide Data Engineering systems.
• Ensure team projects adhere to deadlines, and budgets.
• Implementing features, technology, and processes that move us towards industry best practices, improving on scalability, efficiency, reliability, and security.
• Designing, developing, testing, and maintaining data architectures.
• Preparing data for descriptive, predictive and prescriptive modeling.
• Automating repetitive tasks and manual processes related with the data usage
• Optimizing data delivery.
• Participate in the recruitment process, eventual mentorship and career path of employees.
• Designing, developing, and testing large stream data pipelines to ingest, aggregate, clean, and distribute data models ready for analysis.
• Ensuring the highest standard in data integrity.
• Leveraging best practices in continuous integration and delivery.
• Collaborating with other engineers, ML experts, analysts, and stakeholders to produce the most efficient and valuable solutions.
• Contributing to our data democratization and literacy vision by making accessible and easy-to-use data products and tools.
• Implementing features, technology, and processes that move us towards industry best practices, improving on scalability, efficiency, reliability, and security.
• Responding to Incidents.

Attributes required

• Works well with people, and is passionate about helping people be their best
• Is a team player, an active listener, mentor, and able to communicate well
• Shows solid reasoning and decision making, with the ability to work under pressure
• Is passionate about technology, systems and data
• Is curious, always learning, and keeping up to date with the industry

Qualifications/Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree or Advanced Diploma in Information Systems, Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering and a minimum of 5 years of relevant Data Engineering experience in a software/technology environment is required.
• In the event that a candidate does not have a Bachelor’s Degree or an Advanced Diploma (in Information Systems, Computer Science, Mathematics, or Engineering), an equivalent experience requirement must be met, which equates to a minimum of 8 years of relevant Data Engineering experience in a software/technology environment. 
• Experience with open source relational database systems (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
• Experience leading a team technically, with a focus on a very high quality output is required
• Experience mentoring, coaching, and developing others technically
• Experience working within an Agile team, and an advocate of that culture
• Significant technical experience and a proven track record of data modeling and schema design
• A thorough understanding of database and data warehousing principles (e.g. OLAP, Data Marts, Star Schema, Snowflake, etc.)
• Write code (we use Java and Python)
• Familiar with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Travis, Circle CI, etc.
• Experience with Kafka, PubSub, or other event-based systems
• Experience with stream data pipeline frameworks or solutions such as Apache Flink, Apache Beam, Storm, Databricks, etc.
• Experience with data warehousing, data lakes, lambda/kappa architectures 
• Experience working in cloud environments and with containerisation frameworks, tools and platforms (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, GKE, etc.)

The Environment:

• takealot.com employees are entrepreneurial and dynamic, smart, customer-centric, fun and have the shared ambition of takealot.com being the leading e-commerce company in Africa.
• We have fun, work hard, take ownership, work in teams to create solutions, and are always open to direct feedback/new ideas on where we can improve.
• We are short on ego and high on output.
• We are doers and not only thinkers, it’s all in the execution after all.
• We love what we do and what we are creating.

We seek to employ an Extraordinary Mind who:

• is forthright but respectful
• is an expert at doing, who can not only design but also execute
• is analytical, able to use data to make decisions
• is competitive, self-directed and strive to be the BEST (GREAT requires a lot of work and does not only happen during business hours
• is passionate about the potential of e-commerce and delivering a world-class customer experience
• is entrepreneurial, thrives under change and accepts it is a constant and always looks for solutions to do something better and faster
• is able to think about problems from a business perspective using technical and product input
• is curious and challenge the status quo
• is innovative and enjoys iteration
• is collaborative
• will be at the cutting edge of developing new concepts for takealot.com.
• thinks like an owner of the business.
• is SMART, has INTEGRITY and is HARDWORKING

If you meet the above you are an Extraordinary Mind so come and join us!

I acknowledge that if I have a personal information access request or a deletion request in terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act, that request can be sent to hr@takealot.com

Takealot is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applicants from the previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities will be given preference.