Data Platform Engineer

Location: Cape Town, hybrid, with two days per week in the office

Company

hirify.global operates a commerce partnership marketing platform that helps brands manage affiliate, influencer, content publisher, and customer referral partnerships.

What you will do

• Own data platform components and pipeline domains end to end, including design, implementation, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Build scalable batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines with Spark, Dataproc, Kafka, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and other data stores.
• Maintain platform infrastructure including Dataproc, Kafka, Airflow/Astronomer, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage, while optimizing queries, partitioning, throughput, and resource usage.
• Define and monitor SLOs for freshness, success, and latency; implement monitoring, alerting, data quality checks, and Tier 2 incident response.
• Implement security and governance practices including access control, secrets management, encryption, audit logging, lineage, retention, and data contracts.
• Develop self-service platform capabilities, document architectures and runbooks, participate in code reviews, and mentor Associate Data Platform Engineers.

Requirements

• 3–5 years of experience in data platform, data engineering, or backend/distributed systems engineering, including ownership of production systems at TB scale or systems with stringent SLAs.
• Strong Python and production experience with a JVM language; Scala is the primary pipeline language and requires a willingness to become proficient.
• Hands-on experience with distributed batch processing using Spark or streaming with Kafka or Pub/Sub, plus working familiarity with the other area.
• Advanced SQL, workflow orchestration with Airflow, and experience with a major cloud platform, ideally GCP.
• Experience with Git, CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring, alerting, incident response, on-call, and secure data-system design.
• Clear written and verbal communication, with experience or aptitude for mentoring less experienced engineers.

Nice to have

• Infrastructure as code with Terraform or an equivalent tool and automated deployment experience.
• Experience migrating legacy big-data platforms to cloud-native alternatives.
• Familiarity with dbt, Looker, semantic layers, Astronomer Cosmos, Scala functional programming, or JVM tuning.
• Experience with Grafana, Datadog, Cloud Monitoring, Dataflow, SingleStore, or BigTable.
• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or experience in digital marketing technology.

Culture & Benefits

• Responsible PTO policy and a flexible environment supporting work-life balance.
• Up to 12 fully covered therapy or coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage.
• Monthly gym reimbursement, a technology stipend for the home office, and a monthly internet allowance.
• Restricted Stock Units with a three-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Free Coursera subscription, PXA courses, and paid parental leave of up to 26 weeks for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks for the secondary caregiver.