Data Engineer - Cape Town
PLEASE ONLY APPLY IF BASED IN CAPE TOWN
About Kuunda
Kuunda is a B2B embedded digital financial company that provides liquidity to the informal sector through digital infrastructure and advanced decisioning models. We specialize in real-time, transaction-based lending solutions that support sustainable economic productivity. Our work enables agent networks, small businesses, and consumers to access financing products and services that drive growth and resilience.
Our Team
Our team has deep experience implementing financial services across multiple markets. Collectively, we have delivered solutions in over 17 African countries as well as Asia. Kuunda operates as a hybrid workplace, with operational hubs in Africa and Asia. We’re a diverse, international team of innovators who share a passion for building the future of microfinance and embedded finance.
The Role
As a Data Engineer at Kuunda, you will play a pivotal role in building and maintaining the company’s data infrastructure that powers intelligent decision-making across Africa’s embedded finance ecosystem. You will work across multiple markets and systems, designing secure, scalable, and automated data pipelines on AWS while ensuring the integrity and reliability of data that drives business operations and advanced analytics.
Key Responsibilities
1. Data Engineering & Pipelines
- Design, build, and maintain scalable and secure ETL/ELT pipelines across Redshift, S3.
- Develop and manage AWS Glue jobs for automation, transformation, and catalog management.
- Implement Apache Airflow workflows for data orchestration and monitoring of cross-market processes.
- Optimize data ingestion and transformation performance using AWS-native tools and Redshift best practices.
2. AWS Infrastructure & Security
- Architect and maintain VPCs, subnets, security groups, and gateways (NAT, Internet, Transit) to secure data movement between AWS services.
- Apply AWS best practices for IAM policies, encryption (KMS/S3/Redshift), and secure access management.
- Manage cross-account access, data encryption standards, and compliance alignment with GDPR/POPIA.
- Monitor and remediate infrastructure vulnerabilities in collaboration with the security team.
3. Data Integration & Automation
- Integrate data from external partners (MNOs, financial institutions, third-party APIs) into the centralized warehouse.
- Develop CI/CD pipelines in GitLab for automated deployment of data jobs, schema changes, and tests.
- Create metadata-driven ingestion frameworks and reusable scripts for batch and real-time workloads.
4. Collaboration & Analytics Enablement
- Work with analysts and data scientists to prepare structured datasets for reporting, modeling, and insights.
- Collaborate with the BI and governance teams to maintain lineage, data quality, and catalog documentation.
- Support the scaling of regional data environments, through unified architecture and automation.
Qualifications and Skills
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field.
- 3+ years of experience in data engineering or data infrastructure.
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect or Similar (VPC setup, S3, Glue, Redshift, IAM, Lambda, Gateway, CloudWatch).
- Advanced proficiency in SQL and Python for data transformation and automation.
- Experience with GitLab for version control and CI/CD automation.
- Familiarity with Apache Airflow (DAG creation, scheduling, and monitoring).
Preferred Skills
- Strong understanding of data warehousing principles and dimensional modeling.
- Experience with data security, encryption, and compliance standards.
- Knowledge of DBT or similar tools.
- Exposure to financial or fintech data ecosystems.
What You’ll Bring
- Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills.
- Discipline in data quality, governance, and automation-first thinking.
- A collaborative mindset to work across diverse teams in a fast-paced, multi-country setup.
- Passion for building data systems that power inclusive financial innovation.
What You’ll Get From Us
We’re a team of independent-minded people with diverse skills and shared purpose. Our culture of collaboration and resilience allows us to amplify each other’s strengths and create meaningful change.
We offer:
- Competitive salary and performance-based bonus
- Professional development and career growth opportunities
- Flexible work arrangements and an inclusive culture
- An exciting environment at the forefront of fintech innovation
Location
Cape Town. A minimum of three days a week in the office is required, with travel across Africa as needed.
Interested?
Does this role excite you? Do you want to be part of shaping the future of embedded finance in Africa? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Please apply online to join our dynamic team.
Top Skills
What We Do
Kuunda builds dynamic, embedded financing solutions that create sustainable economic productivity by providing agent networks, small businesses, and consumers with access to liquidity products and services.
Leveraging proprietary credit scoring algorithms, our dynamic borrower profiles are built off real-time behavioural data connected via our channel partners’ existing infrastructure and networks to provide insights into the transactional patterns of agents, small businesses, and consumers. Using the insights generated from these profiles, we enable our partner networks to distribute liquidity to their networks.
To date, Kuunda’s algorithms have been utilised in the creation of both short-term, and medium-term lending solutions, spanning use cases from e-float financing and airtime advances, to working capital facilities and stock financing loans to enable small business growth.
