Data Engineer - Principal

We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer to join our Engineering team in Johannesburg.

The world is changing. We all want something different.

At Luno, we see you as an individual, and we want to unleash your potential and empower you to become the best possible version of yourself.

Luno welcomes crypto lovers and crypto newbies. You - just like everyone in the world - are on your own unique crypto-learning journey.

We are a mission-driven cryptocurrency company that is building more open and equal access to the future of money. You don’t have to know lots about crypto to be interested in joining us, you just have to feel that upgrading the world to a fairer financial system matters, and that you’d like to be part of this global change. We’re a passionate and committed team taking on a challenge of epic proportions. Like the first moon landing, it requires a special kind of people working together with unusual skill, focus and determination. We need the best team on board for our mission.

If that sounds like a culture you’d thrive in, then we are excited to hear from you.

A little about us

• Luno means moon in Esperanto, we chose the name because at night, wherever you are in the world, you look up at the same moon. We believe in the power of working together, as one team, across borders, with clear focus and shared purpose.
• Our popular mobile app and website helps people around the world grow and manage their money using the world's most mature cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDC. We’ve processed over $21 billion to date.
• Over 7 million customers across 40 countries have chosen to hold their crypto wallets on Luno because we offer a delightfully simple experience and bank-grade security.
• We're part of the Digital Currency Group, named in 2021 as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential Companies, in the “Disruptors” category alongside Tesla, AirBnB, SpaceX, Peloton. TIME noted that DCG is “mainstreaming cryptocurrency”.
• We’re proud to be one of the world’s most international cryptocurrency teams, with colleagues from 43 different nationalities working across South Africa, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Nigeria, Australia and Singapore. Financial inclusion is part of our mission, but on a deeper level, inclusion is a way of life, and a way of work for us. It is part of who we are as a company, and a group of human individuals.

How we work

We are a data-driven organisation that puts a huge emphasis on the scaling, storage, and query ability of our data.

Our engineering team (currently ~100 engineers) is split into organisations which we call Fleets. Each Fleet focuses on a core customer journey (onboarding, security, payments, support, new business, growth, and marketing, etc.). Each of these fleets contains multiple smaller teams called Pods, each of which focuses on a specific aspect of the product.

Pods will include a product owner, product designer, back-end engineers, Android, iOS, and Web developers, who each bring a unique perspective to the problem you are all contributing towards. We're agile, use scrum, continuous integration and continuous delivery, deploying to production every single day.

We're building teams to help us succeed in our mission to upgrade the world to a better financial system. You’ll be joining a group of highly motivated software engineers with who you’ll work collaboratively across our pods.

As a fast-growing company with offices around the world, you’ll immediately see how your contributions directly impact both our internal users and client experience. Many of the problems we are solving result in trailblazing solutions which can’t be found on Stack Overflow; so we’re looking for engineers who flourish working in a complex domain.

In your first six months, you will:

Begin your journey at Luno by learning our processes, meeting the wider team, and starting our engineering onboarding program. After getting comfortable with the basics, you'll start learning our idiomatic patterns in a safe, easy-to-follow way: by building your set of own toy microservices. Here you will be involved in and experience our approach to design documents, code reviews, deployments, events, logging, and monitoring.

You will also meet the Pod(s) that you will be working with and quickly align on the teams’ current OKRs and product roadmap. We succeed as a team, so we will provide you with regular feedback from your manager and peers and will encourage you to do the same.

What you'll do:

• Be accountable and responsible for the design and architecture of big data systems that are scalable and robust.
• Work closely with our data science and platform teams on projects that introduce new streams of data into our data lake
• Contribute new ideas to further the development and innovation of our big data solutions
• Have the responsibility for researching and quickly/iteratively applying new big data engineering concepts in the tech industry
• Collaborating with our other principal engineers to develop strategies as well as solutions for our data engineering team
• Be continuously improving our data backup/recovery and storage solutions

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• A Bachelor’s degree in a related field
• Prior experience in a software engineering role
• 7+ years experience in maintaining scalable data solutions
• A proven track record of setting up, refactoring, and maintenance of databases
• A proven track record in setting up, optimizing, and maintaining data lakes
• A proven track record in designing and optimizing ETL pipelines
• Experienced in using AWS data services
• Experienced in integrating data stores with BI platforms

Don’t be put off if you don’t tick all of the boxes – they’re a guide based on what we’d love to see but we appreciate that excellent software engineers have diverse backgrounds.

Remote Life at Luno

If you’re looking to work on something truly global and disruptive with a forward-thinking and ambitious team that highly values diversity, teamwork, and the continuous quest for excellence, then this is an opportunity for you.

Like the majority of the companies, Luno is currently working remotely to keep our employees safe, which means you will not be physically, but virtually onboarded for now!

• Live long and prosper. We’ve got you covered with excellent private medical insurance.
• You'll be able to continuously up-skill yourself with access to free courses on Udemy, Coursera and Codecademy.
• For the crypto fans among you (should be everyone!), you'll pay 0 fees with Luno from the day you start
• Generous maternity / paternity leave.
• An annual inspiration day, over and above your annual and public holiday leave... for that pottery course you’ve always been meaning to do!
• Work with a globally diverse team of hardworking, ambitious and friendly people on something that will truly revolutionise the financial world.
• We have virtual cooking, dancing, drawing and house planting classes hosted by our Lunauts to break up your day and work that other part of your brain.
• Work is important, but your mental health should always take priority. At Luno, we do everything we can to make sure you lead a healthy and happy life. That's why Luno gives you free access to Headspace – a full library of guided meditations, sleep stories, and music.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not negatively discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Be part of the change! 🚀