Software Engineer

We are assisting our client, an early-stage, VC-backed analytics platform company with a distributed global team. They build high-performance data systems that help digital enterprises analyze marketing performance, forecast core business metrics, and optimize large-scale capital allocation.

Their engineering culture values autonomous execution, clean architecture, and pragmatic problem-solving without corporate bureaucracy.

The Role

You will take full ownership of the data ingestion layer: designing, building, and running the code-first pipelines that collect data from diverse external platforms and REST/GraphQL APIs, ensuring every record lands reliably and with high accuracy.

You will collaborate closely with machine learning engineers, product leads, platform developers, and client-side technical teams.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain production Python services that connect to third-party external APIs, managing authentication, pagination, rate limits, retries, and historical backfills.
• Design and operate code-first data pipelines that transform and stage data for downstream analytics, predictive models, and customer-facing interfaces.
• Collaborate on pipeline orchestration built in TypeScript to give stakeholders real-time visibility into pipeline execution.
• Build automated validation, alerting, and data quality monitors to catch schema shifts and discrepancies quickly.
• Work with external technical teams on custom API integrations and data edge cases.
• Scope, estimate, and ship reliable software end-to-end as an independent builder.

Candidate Requirements

• Location: Based in or around Cape Town (remote-first, with periodic local team meetups).
• Experience: 4+ years of professional software engineering experience writing production code, with Python as your primary daily language.

Must-Haves:

• Strong, daily production proficiency in Python.
• Proven hands-on track record building and operating external API integrations in code.
• Solid experience creating code-first data pipelines (ingestion, transformation, and scheduling).
• Strong SQL and data modeling fundamentals, including a clear understanding of OLTP vs. OLAP database design.
• Working comfort with TypeScript, or the demonstrated ability to pick it up quickly.
• Sound API and schema design fundamentals.
• Practical experience using AI coding assistants in daily engineering workflows.

Bonus Points:

• Commercial TypeScript / Node.js production experience.
• Hands-on work with cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake or BigQuery.
• Familiarity with data processing libraries like Polars or Pandas.
• Prior exposure to digital marketing platforms, attribution APIs, or ad-tech data feeds.
• Experience handling high-throughput or large-scale dataset ingestion.
• Practical containerisation (Docker) and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) experience.

Why Consider This Role?

• Early-Stage Impact: Join as a foundational engineer with real technical autonomy, shipping systems that run at high data volumes.
• Complex Data Challenges: Work directly on high-throughput data extraction, automated transformation, and custom integration architecture.
• Modern Engineering Standards: Operate in a collaborative, code-first engineering setup where quality and reliability matter.