Database Reliability Engineer

Cape Town, ZA Until 9/21/2026 First posted July 23, 2026 Last posted July 23, 2026
Job description

OVERALL PURPOSE

We are building a small, focused innovation pod inside a fintech scale-up — and data reliability is at the core of everything we ship.

This is not a traditional DBA role. You will own the full lifecycle of data in the pod: pipelines, migrations, schema safety, and the observability to know when something breaks before the business does. You will also own CI/CD and the infrastructure layer on Azure — because in a small, fast-moving team, deployment reliability and data reliability are the same problem.

If you have made the shift from protecting databases to enabling teams to move fast without breaking data, and want to build something from the ground up within a fast-moving agentic development process, this is the role.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Design, execute, and safeguard database and schema migrations — including rollback strategies
  • Build and maintain data pipelines — from ingestion through to reliable, queryable outputs
  • Work with modern data tooling (dbt, Snowflake, or equivalent) as the pod's data stack matures
  • Set up and maintain observability across both data and application layers: logging, metrics, alerting
  • Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for rapid, safe deployment
  • Own the infrastructure layer on Azure: environments, configuration, secrets, networking
  • Manage containerized workloads using Docker and Azure managed services
  • Document data and infrastructure decisions so production teams can inherit what we build

THE EXPERIENCE WE’RE LOOKING FOR

    • Production experience with database migrations and data pipelines in a regulated or financial environment
    • Comfort with modern data tooling — dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery, or equivalent
    • Demonstrated experience owning CI/CD pipelines end-to-end
    • Hands-on with Docker and Azure managed services
    • Strong understanding of observability tooling across data and application layers
    • Comfortable operating as the sole data reliability and platform function within a small team
    • Systematic approach to data integrity, deployment risk, and rollback planning

    You will be expected to grow into:

    • Infrastructure as Code practices (Terraform or equivalent) — prior IaC experience is a strong advantage but not a blocker for the right candidate

    Advantageous:

    • Familiarity with agentic development workflows or AI-assisted tooling
    • Prior experience preparing data systems for handoff to a larger ops or platform team

    OUR TECH STACK

    • Azure
    • Snowflake
    • DBT
    • Python
    • SQL
    • Hex
    • GitHub

    About this role

    Summary

    Own data reliability, pipelines, migrations, observability, and infrastructure on Azure.

    Job title

    Database Reliability Engineer

    Experience level

    mid level

    Industry

    financial

    Location requirements

    Cape Town, ZA, on-site; remote possible

    Salary

    Not specified

    Management role

    No

    Skills & keywords

    Required skills

    database migrationsdata pipelinesdbtSnowflakeci/cddockerazure

    Preferred skills

    infrastructure as codeterraformagentic development workflowsai-assisted tooling

    Specializations

    databasesdata pipelinesci/cdazuredocker
    Locations

    Structured locations inferred from the posting.

    Cape Town, South Africa

    On-site City

    Cape Town, South Africa

    Remote City