Senior Data Engineer

At KingMakers, we’re not here to follow the industry, we’re here to define it.

We are a proudly homegrown African company, building the future of sports and iGaming entertainment across the continent. Since our launch in 2018, we’ve created platforms that connect millions of fans to the excitement they love through our leading brands, BetKing and SuperSportBet.

From Nigeria to South Africa, we’ve rapidly grown into a powerhouse, recognized for raising standards, pushing boundaries, and shaping what’s next in our industry. Our vision is bold: to be the home where Africa plays.

Collaboration, innovation, and fearless execution define our culture. Every decision is purposeful, every interaction impactful, and every product designed to serve our players and partners with excellence.

We move fast, stay curious, and constantly raise the bar. Our mission is to deliver entertainment with integrity, innovation, and impact - because great products can change how entire communities experience play.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will be designing, implementing and owning data engineering solutions across global projects and products. Your role involves architecting scalable data pipelines, designing robust data models, optimising storage systems, and enhancing data infrastructure performance. You'll tackle complex technical challenges, proposing innovative solutions.

Working closely with cross-functional teams, you'll ensure data quality and accessibility while contributing to the company's overall data strategy. You'll also have opportunities to mentor junior engineers and influence best practices in data engineering across multiple squads.

This is a senior, ownership-driven role where you will be expected to take complex and sometimes ambiguous challenges from concept through to production with a high degree of autonomy. You will be expected to own solutions end-to-end, including data modelling, pipeline design, implementation, production support, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software development experience in data engineering, building and maintaining data platforms.
• Strong data modelling expertise, including dimensional modelling, defining grain, designing facts and dimensions, and handling slowly changing data over time.
• Experience with DBT for data transformation and modelling
• Expert proficiency working with PySpark, Python, SQL, and Delta Lake.
• Proven experience in managing data quality, including implementing monitoring, validation, and alerting mechanisms to ensure reliable and trustworthy data
• Experience in designing and implementing efficient, scalable data pipelines utilising CI/CD, optimizing query performance and reducing costs and tuning data platforms to ensure scalability in large-scale data environments.
• Solid understanding of data governance and data lineage concepts, and how they support scalable and trustworthy data platforms
• Experience with data orchestration and workflow management in production environments (e.g. scheduling, dependencies, reliability of pipelines using tools such as Airflow or Databricks Workflows).
• Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous problems end-to-end, make sound technical decisions, and drive solutions independently with minimal oversight
• Experience contributing to data platform and architecture decisions, with the ability to clearly justify modelling and design choices using structured reasoning

Ideally with experience of

• Working with cloud-based data platforms, ideally within the Azure ecosystem (e.g., Azure Data Lake, Databricks), and familiarity with modern event-driven architectures.
• Exposure with real-time and streaming data technologies, such as Kafka
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts, architectural decisions, and trade-offs between scalability, cost and reliability
• A proactive, ownership-driven mindset, with a strong focus on quality, continuous improvement, and raising engineering standards

What you’ll do

• Data Quality: Own initiatives that improve data quality across data products, including validation, monitoring and quality assurance at scale. Design and implement robust validation frameworks, data cleansing processes, and quality assurance measures to ensure accurate, consistent, and reliable data as scale.
• Technology: Stay up to date with emerging data engineering tools, frameworks, and methodologies. Evaluate and recommend technologies to improve data processing, storage, and analytics capabilities, while promoting best practices in internal tools and platform development. Evaluate build vs reuse and design trade-offs to ensure scalable, maintainable and cost-efficient data platform solutions.
• Data Engineering & Delivery: Architect, build and operate scalable, high-performance data solutions across the full lifecycle, including ingestion, transformation, modelling, orchestration, data quality and serving layers, supporting both batch and real-time use cases.
• Team Collaboration: Work effectively within a cross-functional team, sharing knowledge and contributing to a culture of continuous learning, engineering excellence, and innovation within the data engineering group. Participate in technical design discussions, challenging assumptions where appropriate to improve data models, pipelines and platform design
• Business Acumen: Understand the relationship between technical solutions and business needs. Enable stakeholders to derive actionable insights aligned with business objectives
• Communication: Effectively communicate technical concepts and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, supporting data engineering initiatives

How You Do It – Our CROWNS, Our Values

At KingMakers, our CROWNS values aren’t posters on the wall - they’re how we work and win together:

• Customer First: Build with and for our customers. Always deliver meaningful value.
• Raise the Bar: Take initiative, own outcomes, and push for better every time.
• Operate with Candor: Be open, clear, and constructive. Speak truth with kindness.
• We Build Together: Collaborate, share the load, and succeed as a team.
• No Hesitation, Never Reckless: Move boldly and responsibly. Own your risks.
• Speed & Iteration: Act fast, learn fast, improve fast. Progress beats perfection.

Benefits

What we offer:

• Flexible Work – Hybrid model and flexible hours, giving you the freedom to collaborate in the office or focus remotely.
• Health & Wellness – Private health insurance and wellness benefits to keep you feeling your best.
• Retirement & Group Risk – Joint contributions to your Retirement Annuity (RA) and Group Risk Fund to secure your future (South Africa hub).
• Stress-Free Parking – Safe, convenient parking so your day starts smooth.
• Top-Notch Tech – A high-performance laptop and tools to make your work seamless and productive.
• Team Activities – Regular events to connect, collaborate, and have fun with your colleagues.
• Office Perks – Free snacks, coffee, and a welcoming environment to keep you energized.
• Performance Bonuses – Discretionary rewards recognizing your contributions and impact.

At KingMakers, we’re committed to creating an environment where you can do your best work, grow, and be rewarded for it.