Cloud Data Engineer – Azure (12‑month contract)

About the role

We are seeking a Cloud Data Engineer to join a leading financial services client in Sandton on a 12‑month contract. The role focuses on designing, building and maintaining enterprise‑grade data platforms on Microsoft Azure, enabling advanced analytics and business intelligence across the organisation.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain scalable, fault‑tolerant data pipelines for structured, semi‑structured and unstructured data.
• Build and optimise enterprise data solutions using Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Apache Spark, Python, Scala and Ab Initio.
• Implement DataOps best practices, including automation, orchestration, testing and CI/CD for batch and streaming workloads.
• Collaborate with software engineering teams to create secure APIs and real‑time data services.
• Design, build and manage hybrid cloud data platforms on Azure and on‑premises environments.
• Apply Infrastructure as Code to automate cloud infrastructure deployment.
• Establish monitoring, observability and performance management for data platforms.
• Partner with security, governance and architecture teams to enforce data security, masking, anonymisation and POPIA compliance.
• Lead proof‑of‑concepts and evaluate emerging data engineering technologies.
• Embed automated data quality, validation, auditing and lineage within pipelines.

Required profile

• Proven experience designing and delivering end‑to‑end data platforms at enterprise scale.
• Strong understanding of data governance, security controls and South African data protection regulations (POPIA).
• Ability to work collaboratively with software engineers, data scientists, analysts and business stakeholders.
• Experience leading technical evaluations and proof‑of‑concept initiatives.

Required skills

• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft Fabric
• Azure Databricks
• Apache Spark
• Python
• Scala
• Ab Initio
• DataOps and CI/CD pipelines
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)