Data Engineer - Research and Automation

Data Engineer – Research and Automation

South Africa (Remote) EST Hours

About the company

A fast-growing startup is building tools that let people explore and furnish digital versions of their actual homes, bringing together residential data, 3D spaces, furniture catalogs, and interactive design.

About the role

Discover and organize the residential information needed to create digital homes. Combine substantial independent research with engineering: find useful sources, evaluate their quality and coverage, and devise ways to fill gaps. Build systems that collect, translate, and maintain data at scale.

What you will do

• Research and evaluate new sources of building, unit, listing, floor-plan, and photograph data while improving extraction from existing sources.
• Identify coverage gaps and develop new collection or enrichment methods. Build web indexing, scraping, public API integrations, and ingestion workflows for large public datasets.
• Design databases and information architecture that connect buildings, units, plans, images, and source records.
• Normalize and reconcile records, handle duplicates and conflicting evidence, and retain source provenance and freshness.
• Automate collection, updates, validation, and recovery with minimal manual intervention; deliver usable evidence to the twin-building team and make gaps explicit.

What you bring

• Hands-on data extraction, web scraping, API integration, and database development, with strong research and problem-solving habits.
• Experience transforming messy external data into structured, useful datasets and operating repeatable automations.
• Ability to assess source coverage, accuracy, usage constraints, and the risk of incorrectly matching records.
• Python, SQL, browser automation, and data orchestration tools are relevant examples. Public-data, web-indexing, real-estate, open-source, or hackathon projects are valuable evidence.

How the team works

This is an AI-first team. Demonstrate how you already use coding agents and AI tools to research, build, debug, test, and document work. The team measures useful output, quality, and reliability; you remain accountable for reviewing and maintaining what you ship. Adaptability matters more than familiarity with a particular language. Bring curiosity, initiative, and startup ownership: understand the objective, identify useful next steps, propose solutions, and follow through without waiting for detailed instructions. Fluent professional English, spoken and written, is required for clear technical discussion and collaboration.

Experience and working arrangement

• Mid-level individual contributor with approximately 3–8 years of professional experience.
• Established engineering fundamentals, independent execution, and practical AI fluency.
• Demonstrated capability and ownership matter more than years alone.
• Full-time, ongoing role. Work as closely as practical to New York business hours.