Data Engineer

ABOUT US

Nawiri Group operates a portfolio of leading responsible travel companies and is a core partner of impact organisations and initiatives in some of Africa’s most important wilderness areas. With roots dating back to the 1990s, we employ more than 1,100 people across 20 camps and lodges in Kenya and Tanzania, with commercial and support offices in several countries.

Our commitment to making a positive impact in the wilderness areas and local communities where we operate has earned us international recognition, including our first B-Corp certification, the first in Africa, over a decade ago.

As a certified B Corp, Nawiri Group and its multi-award-winning companies are deeply committed to the well-being of natural ecosystems and local communities. We have ambitious growth plans and are expanding our operational, commercial, analytical and technology capabilities to enable the further scaling of both our guest experiences and travel offerings as well as our positive impact activities in the region.

Why work for us?

• Purpose - Join a certified B Corp that has been consistently pioneering and innovating at the frontier of responsible travel, driven to harnesses the power of business for the greater good.

• Impact - What we believe rests on 3 main pillars namely Elevated experiences, Impact together and Meaningful connections. See your work make a real difference to the business, our guests and our foundation.

• Flexibility - Hybrid working from our offices in Cape Town, Nairobi, Arusha or London, with option for remote work.

• People - Collaborate and work alongside talented colleagues who strive for excellence.

• Timing - Join at an exciting time in the Nawiri data and analytics space as we significantly accelerate and grow how Nawiri leverages data to support decision-making. A real say in how we build our landscape and room to grow with the team.

ROLE SUMMARY

As a Data Engineer you will build and operate secure, reliable and scalable data products and platform services that turn source-system data into trusted, AI-ready datasets for reporting and analytics. This role owns assigned integrations, pipelines, transformations and technical data models end to end, applying modern software-engineering and DataOps practices. Working with Analytics, Data Science, Technology and business teams, you will improve data quality, reliability and cost efficiency across the Nawiri data platform.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Delivery and stakeholder partnership - Turn business and analytics requirements into practical designs, and own assigned data products from build through to production support.

• Data integration - Build and maintain batch, incremental and change-data-capture pipelines from databases, APIs, SaaS platforms, files and event sources.

• Transformation and modelling - Develop tested, documented and modular data models that analysts and Power BI users can trust.

• Platform Architecture, Innovation and modernisation - Deliver scalable, resilient and cost-efficient changes to the Nawiri data platform providing governed, reproducible data for analytics and AI.

• Reliability, quality and governance - Implement automated testing, monitoring, alerting and lineage; manage access, privacy and platform cost; investigate incidents and fix root causes.

• Engineering standards - Use Git, peer review, CI/CD and infrastructure as code; create reusable patterns, documentation and runbooks; share knowledge and support colleagues.

Requirements

QUALIFICATIONS

• Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Mathematics or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Essential

• 4+ years in data engineering (or software engineering with a strong data focus), including ownership of production data pipelines.

• Advanced SQL, including complex queries and performance tuning, and strong Python for data work, with clean, testable code.

• Solid SQL Server and T-SQL experience, including the ability to support, troubleshoot and reverse-engineer SSIS packages and SQL Server Agent jobs.

• Strong data modelling skills, including dimensional modelling (star and snowflake schemas), medallion architecture and layered warehouse design.

• Cloud platform experience (ideally AWS) backed by relevant certifications.

• Hands-on experience with AWS data services, particularly S3, Glue (Python/PySpark) and Lambda.

• Experience with CI/CD and DataOps, moving code smoothly from development to production using version control and deployment frameworks like GitHub.

• Experience monitoring and troubleshooting production workloads, from alerting through to root-cause analysis.

• Sound understanding of data-quality testing, lineage, access control and data privacy.

• AI Integration leveraging LLMs and AI-assisted tools safely to accelerate development while fully understanding the underlying data logic.

• Supporting Power BI and enabling data-science and AI workloads.

Advantageous

• Snowflake development, including stages and Snowpipe, streams and tasks, role-based access control, and warehouse cost and performance management.

• Automating and scheduling workflows using pipeline orchestration tools like Apache Airflow, dbt, Dagster, AWS Step Functions or similar.

• Managed ingestion or CDC tools such as Fivetran, Airbyte or AWS DMS.

• Enforcing fine-grained access control, privacy detection (PII), and metadata management aligned with principles like Data Mesh.

• Infrastructure as code with Terraform, AWS CDK or CloudFormation.

• Relevant cloud or data certifications, such as AWS Certified Data Engineer, AWS Solutions Architect, SnowPro Core, dbt certification.

COMPETENCIES

• Solutions-driven and sound technical judgement

• Analytical problem solving, quality-focused and attention to detail

• Planning, prioritisation and reliable delivery

• Process optimisation, innovative and efficiency-focused

• Working collaboratively with people (team-focused)

• Clear communication and stakeholder management

• Accountable with calm ownership of incidents under pressure

• Continuous improvement, being curious and cost conscious

• Learning agility and adaptability

ATTRIBUTES AND BEHAVIOURS

• Own the Outcome - take responsibilityfor delivering results, not just completing tasks.

• Equip & Empower - set others up to succeed and trustthem to leadand decide.

• Speak Up - share context, challenge constructively, and say what needs to be said.

• Customer First - design our decisions and actions around the peoplewe serve.

• Collaborate for Impact - work across boundaries to deliver outcomes that matter.

• Keep Learning - stay curious, learn fast, and improvethrough action and reflection.

• Lead With Heart - combine care, honestyand accountabilityin how we lead and work.