Lead Data Engineer

Location: Cape Town, South AfricaReporting to: Data Operations Manager

Permanent | On behalf of our client

Key Recruitment is partnering with our client, a global faith-based organisation, in their search for a Lead Data Engineer to join their Data and Insights team in Cape Town.

Who They Are

Our client is a global organisation that exists to introduce people to Jesus and encourage them to become his true followers. Founded in 1988, they are driven by a pioneering spirit, embracing creativity and innovation to advance evangelism through new horizons, in both physical and digital realms.

Are you passionate about sharing the gospel and motivated by a desire to create meaningful change at scale? Our client offers a unique mission-driven opportunity to join a team forging bold frontiers in evangelism.

Job Overview

Our client is seeking a skilled, creative and strategic Lead Data Engineer who shares their passion for evangelism and wants to join their dynamic team in Cape Town. This role is responsible for building, maintaining and evolving the data pipelines, transformation workflows and infrastructure, as well as leading and mentoring the data engineers in the Data and Insights team, in order to unlock insight, scale innovation and inform impact. This role requires both technical expertise and strong leadership skills to guide the team in ensuring that data is clean, structured, trustworthy and ready for analysis, enabling data-informed decisions across all functions and initiatives.

Specific Responsibilities

• Collaborate with stakeholders to gather project requirements, define scope and priorities, and translate them into actionable technical plans
• Lead, mentor and support data engineers through regular team meetings, sprint and project reviews, fostering innovation, collaboration and professional growth
• Plan and manage project execution, maintaining ticketing systems and ensuring tasks are well-defined, prioritised and resourced to meet objectives efficiently
• Design, implement and monitor automated data ingestion pipelines across diverse sources, ensuring quality, consistency, compliance, efficiency and reliability
• Build and optimise ETL/ELT processes to prepare data for reporting, dashboards and analytics, translating business logic into reusable transformation code and models
• Collaborate with analysts and partners in mission initiatives and other cross-functional teams to define key metrics and data outputs that provide organisational value
• Contribute to the design and continuous evolution of the cloud-based data architecture, defining best practices for data storage, performance and access control
• Work closely with Infrastructure and Cybersecurity teams to ensure data platform security, scalability and compliance with organisational and regulatory standards
• Develop and maintain documentation for pipelines, schema designs, workflows and project specifications, ensuring consistency with shared engineering standards and templates
• Provide leadership in onboarding, cross-training and knowledge sharing within the team to sustain operational excellence and continuous improvement
• Collaborate with the Applications, Governance and Cybersecurity teams and partners in Mission teams to ensure secure integrations and high-quality data delivery to support data-informed decision-making
• As part of a global organisation, collaborate across time zones, which may involve out-of-hours availability

General Responsibilities

• Actively pursue personal, professional and spiritual growth
• Contribute positively to the team culture by upholding the organisation's values in attitude and action
• Comply with all organisational policies, procedures and regulatory requirements
• Maintain confidentiality and demonstrate integrity in all matters
• Engage fully in staff and team meetings, collaboration and communication
• Commit to continuous learning and development as needed for the role
• Foster respectful, clear and constructive communication across all interactions
• A practising Christian in full agreement with the organisation's Statement of Faith
• Actively involved in a local church or Christian faith community
• Committed to living according to biblical values

Skills, Experience and Education

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, including pipeline design and ETL development, with leadership experience preferred
• Bachelor's degree in data engineering, data science, data analytics or a related discipline; postgraduate or professional qualifications would be an advantage
• Strong SQL skills and familiarity with Python or other scripting languages, including capability to develop and work with agentic AI
• Experience with cloud data platforms (e.g. Azure Data Factory, Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake), with the ability to guide architectural decisions
• Expertise in data warehousing concepts, dimensional modelling and workflow orchestration
• Understanding of agentic systems and multi-agent orchestration concepts (e.g. MCP, A2A protocols, LangChain-style architectures) would be an advantage
• Familiarity with CI/CD for data workflows, including containerisation (Docker), version control (Git) and infrastructure-as-code
• A continuous learning mindset and familiarity with the latest AI/ML trends, including how LLMs are being integrated into data tooling
• Commitment to data privacy, quality and stewardship, with the ability to lead by example
• High-level written and oral communication skills, and the ability to interact professionally cross-functionally and cross-culturally across all levels of the organisation
• Experience in collaborative team working, contributing to and encouraging a culture of service delivery of the highest quality
• Ability to think and act creatively, and adaptably to problem solve
• Ability to successfully engage in multiple initiatives simultaneously