Senior Data Engineer

Job Title: Senior Data Engineer

Location: Ideally based in one of Shara's hubs in Washington DC, Nairobi, Lagos, or Abuja.

Travel: occasional trips (2-4x per year) to Washington DC, Nairobi or Lagos

At Shara, we’re building for a future where African banking is free, frictionless, and driven by user experience. Where banks are an enabler of the economy, not a tax on it. Where bankers no longer get away with mopping up deposits of the masses, to lend to the few. We believe this future of banking is inevitable, and we want to be the first to build it.

We’re an all-in team of founder-quality people across Kenya, Nigeria, and the US, looking for peers to join us. We care about results, not hours logged. If you’re more comfortable in a Nairobi market or Lagos bus stop than a big corporate office and want to work with switched-on product, engineering, and finance teams building for millions of underserved African SMEs and consumers, we’d love to chat with you. If you’re a no-drama, roll up your sleeves, hop on a flight tomorrow, customer-driven person who can build from day one, we can’t wait for you to join us.

About this role

We’re looking for a senior data engineer to join our Data Science team and help build a modern data infrastructure that will be the pillar of the cloud-native banking future we are building. The development work you’ll do will be a core pillar supporting and bringing this vision to life, as we develop data-enabled and analytics-driven banking products to best serve our markets. As a core member of our Data Science team, you will have the opportunity to design and build the foundational data infrastructure that will make all of this happen, as well as help to grow the group with future machine learning engineers and data scientists.

In this role, you will:

• Architect and build data pipelines to amalgamate a wide variety of data sources.
• Scale and maintain existing data infrastructure from our cloud data warehouse to new infrastructure development.
• Design and build highly available and reliable data services with a focus on machine learning.
• Write & maintain well-tested and documented code.
• Take a high level of ownership and responsibility for your work.
• Work closely with cross-functional stakeholders such as Data Scientists, Products Managers, Engineers, and others to successfully execute and deliver features.
• Make tradeoffs considering business priorities, user experience, and a sustainable technical foundation.

What you bring to the table

• Strong technical experience, with 3+ years of hands-on experience building and maintaining data pipelines and data warehouses, including ELT processing and monitoring.
• You’ll work mostly in Python and SQL, but we care more about general engineering expertise and problem-solving than specific language knowledge.
• Strong interest in data and modern data infrastructure technologies such as Big Query, DBT, Airbyte, Meltano, Airflow/Dagster/Prefect, and others.
• Familiarity with the full cycle of software development, from design and implementation to testing and deployment.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to articulate complex, technical concepts to any audience.

Nice to haves

• Experience building fintech or banking applications.
• Experience supporting Machine Learning Infrastructure.
• Experience optimizing end-to-end performance of distributed systems.

Our Stack

• Python, SQL.
• Java, NodeJS, React Native.
• Postgres, MySQL, BigQuery.
• Kafka, CircleCI, GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Firebase.
• Datadog, Sentry.