Head: Data Engineering

12-15+ years in data engineering, enterprise data platforms, or data warehousing, with 5+ years leading and managing engineering teams delivering at enterprise scale. Demonstrated success designing, building, and operating production-grade batch and streaming data pipelines, with strong DataOps, observability, and lifecycle management. Experience influencing executive decisions across architecture, infrastructure, security, governance, and business data strategy. Proven experience in regulated environments (financial services advantageous), including privacy, records management, and audit requirements. Business Value: Measurable customer and financial outcomes driven through reliable, high-quality data (e.g., faster onboarding, improved reconciliation, BI/AI adoption). Reliability & Risk: Reduced incidents/downtime, improved platform/data SLO attainment, complete lineage, strong DQ scores, audit-ready governance, regulatory compliance. Time to Value: Reduction in end-to-end data onboarding cycle time, % of pilots scaled, velocity of domain data product delivery. Adoption & Reuse: Consumption of shared datasets, conformed models, semantic layers, and reusable engineering components. Capability Uplift: Skills progression of team members; certifications; guild participation and standards adoption. Relentless Customer Focus: Translate business and customer needs into data products, SLAs, data models, and integration patterns; ensure engineered data assets improve decisioning, operational efficiency, and customer experience. Value Hypotheses & Measurement: Define hypotheses, success metrics, and value-realisation plans for data products (e.g., DQ score uplift, latency reduction, reconciliation reduction, time-to-insight improvement); ensure data products are adopted, not just delivered. Co-define Product & Technical Strategy (Full Stack, End to End): Partner with CIO, CDAO, CTO, and Product Owners to craft multi horizon strategies for the enterprise data warehouse/lakehouse, ingestion frameworks, transformation capabilities, and shared data services. Architecturally Sound Solutions: Apply design thinking to create scalable, secure, maintainable data engineering and data platform solutions; guide teams on architectural patterns from conceptual logical physical. Blueprints & Roadmaps: Shape blueprints and roadmaps for platform evolution, modernisation (e.g., legacy EDW to cloud-native), domain data onboarding, and semantic model standardisation. Tech Value Chain Integration: Collaborate across CSO, CTO, CDO, Security, Compliance, and Business to align on "cost-to-value" trade-offs across data storage tiers, compute strategies, and governance requirements. Scoping & Prioritisation: Lead detailed scoping, prioritisation, and integration plans across ingestion, transformation, modelling (dimensional, Data Vault), and serving layers; ensure dependencies are explicit and managed. Architecture & Infrastructure Alignment: Ensure adherence to Group Architecture standards (principles, patterns) and Group Infrastructure practices (OLA's, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, containerisation, networking, security).- Guild Leadership: Lead Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, and Platform Engineering Guilds to share knowledge, codify standards, and build a specialist pipeline for continuity and succession.At Absa, our story is not a single narrative. It's thousands of individual journeys unfolding across Africa and beyond.From colleagues serving customers in local communities to teams shaping financial solutions across borders, Absa is built on people who bring their lived experiences, ambitions and perspectives into the workplace every day. Whether you're starting your career, a seasoned leader or somewhere in between, your contribution is seen, valued and connected to something bigger.Our presence across Africa - which spans personal and business banking, corporate and investment banking, wealth and investment management, and insurance - exists because of the people who show up in their roles with purpose. Across Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, our colleagues are shaping what Absa becomes in each market.Beyond the continent, teams in global offices and a technology hub support and extend the stories that prove that African talent can lead, influence and innovate on the global stage.At Absa, your story matters because progress is driven by human experience, not hierarchy. When people are enabled to bring their whole selves to work, they don't just build careers. They help shape the future of Africa's financial services landscape.