SeniorFull TimeENAfrica
Yoco was founded in 2015, and we’ve been breaking down barriers, unlocking economic opportunities and opening commerce for people to thrive ever since.
We’re the payments provider for over 200,000 self-employed, and process over US$3 billion annually.
We have ±350 team members globally, all with a bias for boldness and a passion for simple, progressive solutions. We believe in uniting different people to solve hard problems, together.
Our mission of making society more equal requires a variety of people, with different backgrounds and points of view, to keep building solutions that make life easier for emerging businesses.
We’re growing fast. With growth comes compelling challenges. If you’re an ambitious problem-solver, with big ideas, a passion for doing good, bright, grounded and courageous; you’re likely to thrive at Yoco.
We don’t stop pushing. We break things to rebuild. We challenge ourselves and each other. We’re constantly evolving - and we’re doing it fast.
Grow With Us.
The Data Engineering team is responsible for developing and maintaining the frameworks that form the foundation of Yoco's data platform.
As a Senior Data Engineer, you are a technical anchor within the Yoco Engineering team. Sitting at the heart of our individual contributor track, you bridge the gap between high-level architectural strategy and hands-on execution. You won't just follow blueprints; you will actively shape and refine them, ensuring our data ecosystem is robust, observable, scalable and efficient.
You will own the full data lifecycle—ingress, egress, and complex transformations—using batch and real-time models. As a Senior, your impact is measured not just by your code, but by your ability to unblock others, mentor engineers, and drive technical excellence across the team.
Technical Execution & Leadership: Own the end-to-end delivery of complex data features. You are expected to navigate project hurdles independently and highlight architectural risks before they become blockers.
Architecture & Technical Standards: Collaborate with Staff Engineers to establish and implement scalable data patterns. Your responsibilities include ensuring consistency, performance, thorough documentation, and continuous enhancement of Yoco's standard data stack, which leverages GCP, Airflow, dbt, and Kafka.
Force Multiplication: You play a key role in elevating the team's collective skill set through code reviews and collaborative problem-solving, supporting and challenging the ideas that underpin the team’s success.
Operational Excellence: Take a lead role in ensuring the efficiency and reliability of our platforms. This includes maturing our monitoring and alerting strategies and participating in (and improving) our incident response processes.
Continuous Innovation: Drive the adoption of modern tools (like dltHub or AI-assisted dev) and data architectures to improve productivity, manage costs and reduce toil.
Experience: 4–6 years of professional Data Engineering experience, with demonstrated growth across the IC track.
Data Platform Mastery: Deep hands-on experience with GCP and/or AWS, specifically in managing data-intensive workloads.
Technical Stack: Expert-level Python and SQL, including experience with testing frameworks, package management, and writing production-grade data transformation logic.
Systems Thinking: A strong understanding of modern software engineering tooling and approaches (IaC, CI/CD, Git, unit/integration testing), how these apply to data (DataOps) as well as a strong understanding of data platform design principles.
Leadership Qualities: Proven ability to lead small-to-medium projects from concept to production and a passion for mentoring more junior peers.
Communication: Clear, proactive communicator. You independently gather requirements from diverse stakeholders, identify constraints, and effectively share ideas, techniques, and feedback with team members via documentation and hybrid working.
Bonus Skills
While experience using modern data stacks is required, hands-on production experience with any of the following will set you apart:
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proven ability to work with Terraform and manage containerised environments, including Docker and Kubernetes.
Real-time Ecosystems: Hands-on experience with Kafka, Confluent Schema Registry and CDC tools like Debezium.
Modern Tooling: Experience with dltHub for simplified ingestion and leveraging AI tools to accelerate development cycles.
We’re looking for people who want to grow and have a thirst for learning. And as Yoco grows, we hope they stay with us for the long-term.
Building solutions for a more equal society is a daunting task - and it’s not for everyone. We never stop pushing, we break things to rebuild, and we challenge ourselves and our teammates. We start over, we constantly evolve - and we do it fast. We know that it’s just the right kind of meaningful madness for our kind of visionary human.
So, who are you? You’re someone who resonates with our mission and our values, and you’re relentlessly effective in your execution.
You’re a curious problem-solver with a passion for doing good. You’re bright, grounded, experimental and bold. You play open cards and get stuck in. You’re not afraid of change. You close the loop.
At Yoco, we laugh, embrace each other’s quirks, and support one another’s growth, all while staying authentic.
If this sounds like your kind of challenge, apply below and come grow with us.
We encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds to apply and ask that you please send your application in English and help us reduce unconscious bias by leaving out your picture, age, address, and other unnecessary information in your CV.
