Senior Data Engineer – @iLabAfrica at Strathmore University

Job Title: Senior Data Engineer
Department: @iLabAfrica
Reporting to: Lead Data Scientist

Basic job summary:
The Senior Data Engineer will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining data infrastructure and pipelines. Implementing data ingestion frameworks,

Duties & Responsibilities:
1. Data Pipeline Design and Implementation
• Design, implement, and maintain robust data ingestion and processing pipelines for heterogeneous data sources, including soil, weather, agronomic, geospatial, and related contextual datasets.
• Develop scalable ETL/ELT workflows to transform raw data into structured, validated, and analytics-ready formats.
• Ensure pipelines support both batch and, where required, near-real-time data processing.
• Implement data versioning and lineage tracking to support reproducibility and auditability.
2. Cloud-Based Data Infrastructure
• Design and manage cloud-native data architectures, including data lakes, data warehouses, and analytical storage solutions.
• Optimize data storage and processing for performance, cost efficiency, and scalability.
• Support deployment of data pipelines across development, testing, and pilot environments.
• Collaborate with platform teams to ensure infrastructure aligns with DPI principles and interoperability standards.
3. Data Quality, Governance, and Reliability
• Implement automated data quality checks, validation rules, and monitoring to ensure accuracy, completeness, and consistency.
• Support enforcement of data governance requirements, including access controls, permissions, and audit logging.
• Work with policy and governance partners to ensure technical implementations align with data protection and consent frameworks.
• Proactively identify and remediate data reliability risks or bottlenecks.
4. Enablement of AI and LLM-Based Systems
• Prepare and serve data in formats optimized for AI and LLM-based advisory systems, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and structured knowledge services.
• Support model evaluation, benchmarking, and experimentation workflows.
5. MLOps Support and Operational Readiness
• Contribute to MLOps workflows by supporting data versioning, pipeline automation, and integration with model deployment and evaluation processes.
• Implement monitoring and logging for data pipelines to support observability and issue diagnosis.
• Support reproducible experimentation through consistent data environments and pipeline automation.
6. Documentation, Collaboration, and Delivery
• Produce clear technical documentation covering data architectures, pipeline logic, and operational procedures.

Minimum Academic Qualifications:
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a closely related technical field

Experience:
• Applicants should possess at least 5 years of professional experience in data engineering, with demonstrated responsibility for designing and operating complex data pipelines and data platforms.
• Strong experience designing and implementing data ingestion, transformation, and processing pipelines (ETL/ELT) for large and heterogeneous datasets.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL, and experience with data processing frameworks and tools commonly used in modern data engineering environments

Competencies and Attributes:
• Strong technical understanding of data engineering architectures, data processing methodologies, and AI/ML data requirements, with the ability to design systems that reliably support advanced analytics and generative AI workflows.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL, and experience with data processing frameworks and tools commonly used in modern data engineering environments.
• Demonstrated experience with cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud), including data storage, compute services, and pipeline orchestration.

Are you qualified for this position and interested in working with us? We would like to hear from you. Kindly send us a copy of your updated resume and letter of application (ONLY) quoting “Senior Data Engineer” on the subject line to recruitment@strathmore.edu by 27th February 2026.

Due to the large number of applications, we may receive, kindly note that only the shortlisted candidates will be contacted. Please be advised that Strathmore University is an equal opportunity employer and does NOT ask for money from applicants under any circumstances during its recruitment process.

Interested applicants are encouraged to exercise caution upon receiving any such interview opportunity that requires payment of any money.