Data Engineer

Takealot.com, South Africa’s leading online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Data Principal Engineer to join our team based in Cape Town.

We are a young, dynamic, hyper-growth company looking for smart, creative, hard-working people with integrity to join us!

Think you’ve been challenged before? Think again!

• Scale: 4 million happy shoppers shop online on takealot.com. Show them what you can do.
• Learn: We work with the best of the best, and then some. Code alongside industry leaders and up-skill in record time.
• Grow: Expand your career in the fast-growing Takealot Group: takealot.com, Mr D and TFS. We like to promote from within: Here’s your chance.

Purpose of the role: 

Our data and analytics platform powers the operational backbone of Takealot Group, from logistics and supply chain to distribution centre analytics and data monetisation products. It's grown fast, and the business increasingly needs real-time operational data that our historically batch-oriented platform wasn't built for.

As Data Principal Engineer, you are the highest individual-contributor technical authority in the data division. The mandate: simplify the ecosystem, build the real-time data layer the business now needs, set the technical standards the Group's data governance programme runs on, and design the automation that keeps governance and platform operations manageable as the Group scales. You'll leave behind an architecture the team can understand, build on, and be proud of.

This is a transformation role, with executive sponsorship, direct business impact, and real autonomy over consequential technical decisions. This is a formalised, senior individual contributor milestone on our technical career ladder, a long-term seat for strong engineers who want to keep growing technically without moving into people management.

Key Responsibilities: 

Ecosystem Architecture & Platform Simplification: 

• Produce a definitive, up-to-date master blueprint of the Group's data architecture, sources, flows, models, KPI mappings and use it to drive a structured simplification programme; cutting over-engineering and technical debt, standardising technology choices across teams, and making it faster to deliver new data products.

Real-Time Operational Enablement: 

• Logistics, Supply Chain, and Distribution Centre operations need faster access to operational data than our current batch-oriented warehouse provides.