Senior Data Engineer

About the role

A global investment advisory firm focused on long-term value creation is hiring a Senior Data Engineer in Cape Town, advertised by Parvana. The role is hybrid, with the option to work in the office daily or remotely. The client is large, offers strong career development and invests heavily in employee benefits.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and optimise complex SQL Server database solutions, writing efficient, scalable and maintainable T-SQL code including stored procedures, views, functions and queries.
• Analyse execution plans, troubleshoot performance issues and implement indexing, partitioning and optimisation strategies for large datasets and high-volume workloads.
• Design scalable relational and analytical data models suited to operational and reporting workloads.
• Build and maintain data ingestion and transformation processes, including ETL/ELT pipelines and integration of data from internal and external systems.
• Define standards for naming conventions, database design and documentation, and contribute to code reviews.
• Mentor developers and engineers on SQL optimisation and data engineering, and work with application developers, BI teams, analysts and stakeholders.
• Support backend application data requirements and reporting needs, and help improve data architecture and engineering practices.

Required profile

• 6+ years of hands-on experience in complex query development, stored procedures, execution plan analysis and query optimisation.
• Deep expertise in indexing, partitioning, transaction management and resolving bottlenecks such as locking, blocking, deadlocks and IO/memory issues.
• Experience designing normalised relational models (3NF/OLTP) and dimensional models (star/snowflake schemas).
• Experience separating transactional and reporting workloads and tuning performance through index tuning, query refactoring and data access optimisation.

Required skills

• ETL/ELT and data pipeline design using Azure Data Factory (ADF), SSIS, dbt, Informatica and APIs, flat files, JSON/XML.
• Familiarity with Azure SQL, Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Fabric, Data Lake architectures, Git, Azure DevOps and CI/CD pipelines.
• Beneficial familiarity with BI tools such as Power BI and Tableau.