Senior Data Engineer (Remote)

About us
LifeCheq is a fintech company changing how South Africans manage their personal
finances. Our platform combines smart tech, deep financial expertise, and a unique
approach to financial advice. We're growing rapidly, backed by major investors including
Futuregrowth, African Rainbow Capital, and Naspers Foundry.
We’re building a deeply data-driven platform and are looking for technically sharp engineers
to help push its foundations to the next level.
What you'll do
You’ll take ownership of our analytics data layer and work closely with our Platform and ML
squads. Your job is to build a fast, clean, and reliable system that integrates backend data
from an event-sourced architecture, external services, and JSON-based event logs—then
serves performant, well-modelled views to analysts, ML pipelines, dashboards, and even the
product frontend.
Early work will include:

• Designing a real-time ingestion pipeline for event-sourced data streams and JSON logs
  on S3, and implementing it for low-latency performance.
• Defining a clear semantic model and restructuring existing views into a maintainable,
  well-layered architecture.
• Optimising Delta Lake performance to deliver near–real-time data (<5 minutes) on a
  reasonable compute budget.
• Formalising schemas for core entities and building structured views that can be safely
  used across analytics, reporting, and application layers.
• Cleaning up pipeline logic to reduce latency, improve readability, and lower cognitive
  overhead.

This work is central to unlocking productivity across the business. Success looks like an
analytics foundation that’s predictable, fast, and easy to extend—powering everything from
dashboards to ML models. As the platform scales, there will be opportunities to extend this
foundation—designing for higher data volumes, streaming complexity, and broader cross-
team data needs.
Who we're looking for
You’re a strong engineer who prioritises fundamentals and performance. You deeply understand
database internals, query optimisation, and distributed systems. You're not tied to specific
tech stacks - your technical depth and ability to reason from first principles matter more
than specific experience with particular tools. This isn’t a role for someone looking
to grow into seniority - it’s for someone already operating at a high level of technical autonomy.
You have:

• Excellent SQL skills and deep understanding of databases
  (indexing, query optimisation, internals).
• Strong coding skills in Python, Clojure or Scala; your code is clean, efficient, and
  production-ready.
• Experience with distributed data processing technologies like Spark.
• A genuine interest in understanding the business and carefully modelling data
  for clarity and performance.
• A rigorous, analytical mindset—you identify bottlenecks proactively
  and design solutions thoughtfully.

This role suits someone with strong end-to-end design skills. You think clearly about
architecture, weigh trade-offs carefully, and implement pragmatic, well-reasoned solutions.
You’ll have real autonomy in how you approach problems—including the freedom to reshape
parts of the stack—while being expected to explain and motivate your decisions with clarity.
You enjoy working closely with both engineers and business stakeholders, and see
collaboration as essential to building systems that are both technically sound and practically
useful.
Bonus points

• Interest in functional programming and experience with Clojure, Scala, or related
  ecosystems.
• Track record of building clean systems in high-ownership environments like startups or
  small technical teams.
• Experience working with Databricks, Delta Lake, and AWS.
• Familiarity with Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code tools.

Working with us
LifeCheq values technical depth, autonomy, and clear thinking. You’ll be part of a small,
capable team that enjoys solving hard problems together and takes pride in doing things
properly. It’s a collaborative, engineering-driven environment where well-reasoned decisions
carry weight and where your ideas will be taken seriously. There’s plenty of room to shape
systems and standards—so long as they’re driven by sound reasoning and a clear-eyed
view of trade-offs.
This is a fully remote role, and we ask for availability during our core hours (10:00 - 16:00
GMT+2).