Lead Data Engineer

This is an on-site role, based at our Cape Town office. Only candidates with full working rights for this location will be considered.

Who We Are

CV (Christian Vision) is a global organisation that exists to introduce people to Jesus and encourage them to become his true followers. Evangelism is at the heart of all we do at CV, bringing the gospel to people around the world in both physical and digital realms.

If you are passionate about sharing the gospel and motivated by a desire to create meaningful change at scale, CV offers a unique mission-driven opportunity to join a team harnessing innovation and navigating new frontiers within evangelism.

Job Overview

We are seeking a skilled, creative, and strategic

Lead Data Engineer who shares our passion for evangelism and wants to join our dynamic team in Cape Town, South Africa. This role is responsible for building, maintaining, and evolving the data pipelines, transformation workflows, and infrastructure, as well as leading and mentoring the data engineers in the Data and Insights team in order to unlock insight, scale innovation, and inform impact. This role requires both technical expertise and strong leadership skills to guide the team in ensuring that data is clean, structured, trustworthy, and ready for analysis, enabling data-informed decisions across all CV functions and initiatives.

Specific Responsibilities

• Collaborate with stakeholders to gather project requirements, define scope and priorities, and translate them into actionable technical plans.
• Lead, mentor, and support data engineers through regular team meetings, sprint and project reviews, fostering innovation, collaboration, and professional growth.
• Plan and manage project execution, maintaining ticketing systems and ensuring tasks are well-defined, prioritised, and resourced to meet objectives efficiently.
• Design, implement, and monitor automated data ingestion pipelines across diverse sources, ensuring quality, consistency, compliance, efficiency and reliability.
• Build and optimise ETL/ELT processes to prepare data for reporting, dashboards, and analytics, translating business logic into reusable transformation code and models.
• Collaborate with analysts and partners in mission initiatives and other cross-functional teams to define key metrics and data outputs that provide organisational value.
• Contribute to the design and continuous evolution of CV’s cloud-based data architecture, defining best practices for data storage, performance, and access control.
• Work closely with Infrastructure and Cybersecurity teams to ensure data platform security, scalability, and compliance with organisational and regulatory standards.
• Develop and maintain documentation for pipelines, schema designs, workflows, and project specifications, ensuring consistency with shared engineering standards and templates.
• Provide leadership in onboarding, cross-training, and knowledge sharing within the team to sustain operational excellence and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with the Applications, Governance and Cybersecurity teams and partners in Mission teams to ensure secure integrations and high-quality data delivery to support data-informed decision-making.
• As part of a global organisation, you will be required to collaborate across time zones, which may involve out-of-hours availability.

General Responsibilities

Fulfil all duties outlined above for this specific role, and as directed below for all team members within CV. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Actively pursue personal, professional, and spiritual growth.
• Contribute positively to our team culture by upholding CV’s values in attitude and action.
• Comply with all CV policies, procedures, and regulatory requirements.
• Maintain confidentiality and demonstrate integrity in all matters.
• Engage fully in staff and team meetings, collaboration, and communication.
• Commit to continuous learning and development as needed for the role.
• Foster respectful, clear, and constructive communication across all interactions.
• A practising Christian in full agreement with the CV Statement of Faith.
• Actively involved in a local church or Christian faith community.
• Committed to living according to biblical values.

Skills, Experience And Education

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, including pipeline design and ETL development, with leadership experience preferred.
• Bachelor's degree in data engineering, data science, data analytics or related discipline. Postgraduate or professional qualifications would be an advantage.
• degree would be an advantage.
• Strong SQL skills and familiarity with Python or other scripting languages, including capability to develop and work with agentic AI.
• Experience with any cloud data platforms (e.g., Azure Data Factory, Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake, etc.), with the ability to guide architectural decisions.
• Expertise in data warehousing concepts, dimensional modelling, and workflow orchestration.
• Understanding of agentic systems and multi-agent orchestration concepts (e.g., MCP, A2A protocols, LangChain-style architectures) to support AI-driven data products and workflows would be an advantage.
• Familiarity with CI/CD for data workflows, including containerization (Docker), version control (Git), and infrastructure-as-code.
• A continuous learning mindset and familiarity with the latest AI/ML trends, including how LLMs are being integrated into data tooling.
• Commitment to data privacy, quality, and stewardship, with the ability to lead by example.
• High-level written and oral communication skills, and the ability to interact professionally cross-functionally and cross-culturally across all levels of the organisation.
• Experience in collaborative team working, contributing to and encouraging a culture of service delivery of the highest quality.
• Ability to think and act creatively, and adaptably to problem solve.
• Ability to successfully engage in multiple initiatives simultaneously.