Data Engineer (Analytics) - Spark / SQL

Data Engineer (Analytics) - Spark / SQL

Location: Johannesburg (Hyde Park office)

Employment type: Full-time, permanent

Seniority: Mid-Senior level

ABOUT COSAUCE

CoSauce is an award-winning South African co-sourcing firm. We build and run dedicated teams in South Africa for companies in North America, Australia and New Zealand. We are not an outsourcer and there is no "B team" - our people work as a direct extension of the client's own team, on the client's tools, in the client's standups, with our leadership accountable for the outcome.

You would join as a permanent CoSauce employee, embedded with a North American payments technology company as your day-to-day team.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Our client's data function is growing and they need an analytics-focused data engineer to own the layer between raw data and the decisions made on it - building the models, pipelines and datasets that the analytics and business teams actually run on.

This is a build role, not a reporting role. You will spend your time in SQL and Spark, shaping messy source data into clean, trustworthy, well-documented models. If you like owning a domain end to end and being the person people trust when a number looks wrong, this is a good fit.

You will work on a modern lakehouse stack (Databricks and Spark), and you will have real influence over how it is built. The platform is maturing, not frozen.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

- Design, build and maintain data models and transformation pipelines that power reporting, analytics and downstream products

- Write and optimise complex SQL against large datasets - performance tuning, not just correctness

- Build and maintain Spark jobs for batch transformation and data processing

- Partner directly with analysts, product and finance stakeholders to turn vague questions into well-defined, reusable datasets

- Own data quality: testing, validation, monitoring and documentation of the models you build

- Improve the reliability and cost efficiency of existing pipelines

- Contribute to data modelling standards, code review and how the team works

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

- 4+ years in data engineering, analytics engineering or a strongly data-focused BI role

- Expert SQL. Window functions, CTEs, complex joins, query optimisation, working with genuinely large tables. This is the single most important thing we screen on

- Hands-on Apache Spark. You have written and shipped Spark transformations, not just read about them

- Strong data modelling fundamentals - dimensional modelling, slowly changing dimensions, knowing when to denormalise and why

- Solid Python or Scala for data work

- Version control and code review as a normal way of working (Git)

- Clear written English and the confidence to push back on a badly specified request

- Comfortable with a daily overlap into North American hours, roughly 3pm - 7pm SAST

NICE TO HAVE

- Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, notebooks, job orchestration). You do not need to be a Databricks power user - if you know Spark and SQL well, the platform is learnable

- Scala with Spark

- dbt or a similar transformation framework

- Cloud data platforms (Azure, AWS or GCP)

- Orchestration tooling (Airflow, Databricks Workflows, Dagster)

- Streaming or near real-time data experience

- Payments, fintech or high-volume transactional data

- Experience working remotely with an overseas team

HOURS

Standard South African working day, with a required overlap of approximately four hours into the client's North American morning - in practice roughly 3pm to 7pm SAST. The rest of your day is yours to structure. This is a real requirement rather than a preference: you will be in their standups and working sessions.

WHAT WE OFFER

- Permanent employment with CoSauce South Africa. Not a contract, not a placement

- Remuneration of R550,000 - R800,000 CTC depending on experience

- Remote-first, based in Johannesburg or Cape Town

- Direct, long-term embedding with a single client team, so you build real domain depth rather than rotating through short projects

- Genuine exposure to a modern lakehouse stack and North American engineering practice

- Career path into senior and lead data roles as the team scales

HOW TO APPLY

Apply through LinkedIn with your CV. In your application, tell us:

1. The largest dataset you have worked with, and what you did to make it fast

2. One data model you are proud of, and why it was hard

We review every application and respond either way.

CoSauce is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and are committed to employment equity in South Africa.