Associate Data Platform Engineer

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

Company

hirify.global provides a commerce partnership marketing platform covering affiliate, influencer, content publisher, brand ambassador, and customer advocacy partnerships.

What you will do

• Build and extend batch and streaming pipeline components using Scala and Python, including Spark transformations, Airflow DAGs, and Kafka consumers under guidance.
• Configure BigQuery tables, partitioning strategies, and Cloud Storage buckets.
• Create monitoring dashboards, alerting, and data quality checks for job success, latency, pipeline health, anomalies, schema violations, and missing data.
• Shadow on-call rotations, investigate root causes, debug with logs, metrics, and traces, and maintain runbooks and operational documentation.
• Apply least-privilege access, secrets management, PII handling, and cost and performance awareness.
• Participate in code reviews, pairing, technical discussions, and clear communication of progress and blockers while using AI coding assistants to the same quality standards.

Requirements

• 1–3 years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or a related technical role.
• Working programming ability in Scala, Java, or Python, with an appetite to become strong in both Scala and Python.
• Solid SQL fundamentals, including joins, aggregations, window functions, and understanding query behaviour.
• Understanding of data structures, algorithms, software engineering basics, Git, and collaborative development workflows.
• Exposure to or eagerness to learn distributed processing with Spark, streaming with Kafka or Pub/Sub, orchestration with Airflow, and a major cloud platform, ideally GCP with BigQuery, Dataproc, and Cloud Storage.
• Strong problem-solving instincts and a methodical approach to debugging.
• Clear written and verbal communication suited to an async-first distributed team.
• Willingness to participate in on-call learning and operational work.

Nice to have

• Internship, academic, or personal project experience building data pipelines.
• Exposure to CI/CD, automated testing, or infrastructure as code.
• Familiarity with Parquet, Avro, or JSON.
• Exposure to dbt, Looker, or BI tooling.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.
• Experience in the digital marketing technology industry.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work in Cape Town with a flexible Responsible PTO policy and emphasis on work-life balance.
• Up to 12 fully covered therapy or coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage, plus a monthly gym reimbursement.
• Restricted Stock Units with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Free Coursera subscription and PXA courses for continuous learning.
• 26 weeks of fully paid parental leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks for the secondary caregiver.
• Technology stipend for a home office and monthly internet allowance.