Data Engineer

ABOUT LULALEND

Lulalend is a FinTech company with a belief in the power of small business. We work hard to empower businesses across South Africa with the funds they need to grow. Small business owners are the foundation for growth in our economy, and they deserve an easy and inspiring lending process.

Lulalend was founded because there is an underserved market for access to funding that the banks and other lenders overlook. We innovate in order to significantly reduce this credit gap - directly assisting our economy and job creation on a grand scale. So, by joining our team you’re helping businesses stay open, grow and offer more job opportunities. Yay you!

Lulalend is a one of a kind business – literally. There is no-one in South Africa doing what we’re doing yet, because we’re awesome!

OUR VALUES

At Lulalend we:

• Are passionate about helping SMEs succeed
• Believe in responsible lending
• Strive to offer an unbeatable customer experience
• Value humility and teachability
• Embrace technology
• Communicate openly
• Work hard and play hard

OVERALL PURPOSE

We are looking for a confident and experienced Data Engineer to join our team. You will be tasked with implementing and maintaining data models with the goal of improving data reliability and quality, ensuring scalable data pipelines are working smoothly, and bugs and performance issues are quickly identified.

As a member of the Data Science team, your primary focus will be to combine raw information from different sources to create consistent and consumption-ready formats. More specifically, you will need to construct and test architectures that enable data extraction and transformation for predictive or prescriptive modeling.

Responsibilities will include:

• Analyze and organize raw data
• Develop and maintain scalable data pipelines and systems
• Combine raw information from different sources
• Collaborate with data scientists on several projects
• Selecting and building features for consumption by machine learning algorithms
• Plan, build and maintain the Data Warehouse
• Data mining using state-of-the-art methods
• Identify opportunities for data acquisition and extending company’s data with third party sources of information when needed
• Explore ways to enhance data quality and reliability
• Enhancing existing data collection procedures to include information that is relevant for building analytical systems
• Processing, cleansing, and verifying the integrity of data used for analysis
• Doing ad-hoc analysis and presenting results in a clear manner
• Creating automated anomaly detection systems and constant tracking of its performance
• Build and maintain API’s hosted by the Data Science team, ensuring 99.9% uptime
• When required, build out new API integrations to support continuing increases in data volume and complexity
• Write unit/integration tests, contribute to data engineering wiki, and document work
• Refactoring code in order to maintain neatness in the data science repos
• Build classes from repetitive code in order to ensure quicker development of data science projects
• Improve deployment processes for the Data Science team

THE SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• Technical expertise with data models, data mining, and segmentation techniques
• Previous experience as a Data Engineer or in a similar role4+ years of Python development experience, including Flask or Django4+ years of SQL experience4+ years of experience with schema design and dimensional data modeling
• 4+ years of Python development experience, including Flask or Django
• 4+ years of SQL experience
• 4+ years of experience with schema design and dimensional data modeling
• Great numerical and analytical skills
• Process oriented with great communication and documentation skills
• Experience with Agile methodologies
• Degree in Computer Science, IT, or similar field; a Master’s is a plus
• Data engineering certification (e.g Microsoft Certified Azure Data Engineer) is a plus