Data Principal Engineer

Location: Cape Town, South Africa; hybrid working model

Company

hirify.global is a leading South African online retailer operating a large e-commerce platform and the Takealot Group.

What you will do

• Create a master blueprint of the Group’s data architecture, sources, flows, models, and KPI mappings, and lead platform simplification and technical debt reduction.
• Design and build an event-driven, real-time data layer for logistics, supply chain, distribution centre operations, and operational analytics.
• Establish technical standards for data quality, lineage, documentation, data management, security, privacy, and model governance.
• Align BigQuery, Dataform, and Looker for safe AI consumption, including documented schemas, semantic layers, data contracts, and secure AI-agent integration.
• Build automation, maturity telemetry, self-service onboarding tools, and AI-assisted copilots to reduce manual governance and platform operations.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor senior and staff engineers, advise the Engineering Director, and develop architecture and governance training.

Requirements

• 8+ years of data engineering experience, including at least 3 years at principal or architect level in a complex, high-scale environment.
• Experience delivering large-scale warehouses or lakehouses, real-time event streaming, data ingestion frameworks, platform simplification, and technical debt reduction.
• Hands-on experience with AI or ML data infrastructure and integration of LLM tooling such as copilots, agents, or RAG with data platforms.
• Deep GCP expertise, especially BigQuery and Dataform, plus experience with Kafka, Pub/Sub, or equivalent stream-processing frameworks.
• Strong Python and SQL skills; experience with dimensional and event-driven data modelling, Looker/LookML, Terraform or equivalent IaC, and CI/CD for data pipelines.
• Knowledge of data governance, architecture documentation, auditability, lineage, compliance requirements, and POPIA obligations.

Nice to have

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field; equivalent experience is considered.
• Familiarity with DMBOK, dbt-style transformation frameworks, and orchestration tools.
• Exposure to logistics, e-commerce, or supply chain data.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work combining office collaboration and working from home.
• Mentorship, Naspers Tech Community access, and online learning through MyAcademy, Udacity, and Coursera.
• Market-related total remuneration package with flexible options.
• Birthday leave, staff discount, free parking, social events, and confidential counselling, legal, and financial support.
• Access to a broad technology environment including Python, Scala, Kotlin, Google Cloud, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes, and machine learning tools.