Data Engineer

SadaPay is revolutionizing financial services in Pakistan by offering a seamless, digital-first experience that simplifies money management. With over three-quarters of the population still unbanked, SadaPay provides an accessible platform requiring only a CNIC, phone number, and smartphone—eliminating paperwork and long waits. Serving over 3 million users, the company delivers transparent banking with no hidden fees, free local transfers, and an enjoyable payment experience supported by friendly customer service and a vibrant debit card.

Key Responsibilities
- Own and manage the data platform end-to-end, including event-driven pipeline operations deployed on AWS serverless and container compute environments, fed by Kafka, S3, schedules, and events.
- Maintain and monitor dozens of production pipelines, ensuring they fail loudly and transparently when issues arise.
- Optimize the platform by retiring obsolete pipelines, consolidating duplicates, and thoroughly documenting active pipelines.
- Handle ingestion and delivery of settlement, transaction, and status files from card, switch, and payment-rail partners via SFTP and APIs, treating each partner file format as a contract with strict validation against schema drift, late arrivals, and missing files.
- Build and maintain reconciliation processes between SadaPay’s ledger and partner records, surfacing matched, unmatched, returned, and declined transactions to relevant teams.
- Develop replay and backfill tools to correct data issues without manual intervention.
- Design and maintain warehouse models using dbt on top of the lakehouse architecture, collaborating with analytics engineers to meet business needs while ensuring freshness, testing, clear lineage, and cost efficiency.
- Protect sensitive personal and financial data by enforcing access controls, separation, and auditability in compliance with data residency and regulatory requirements.
- Prepare for audits by documenting data flows, access permissions, and compliance measures.

Required Qualifications
- Minimum of 3 years’ experience building and operating production data pipelines, beyond just writing queries.
- Proficiency in Python and SQL, capable of writing efficient transformations and diagnosing performance issues.
- Hands-on experience with AWS data services including S3, serverless/container compute, data catalogues, and cloud warehouses such as Redshift.
- Experience with Kafka or similar event streaming platforms for data ingestion and production.
- Familiarity with dbt or equivalent data modeling frameworks, including implementing tests and documentation.
- Strong attention to correctness, including idempotent job design, safe reruns, and clear explanations of data derivations.
- Practical daily use of AI tools in workflows such as code writing, debugging, and model explanation.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits
- Experience in financial reconciliation, handling settlement files, matching logic, and investigating discrepancies.
- Operational experience with file exchanges over SFTP and the discipline it demands.
- Knowledge of infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent) and CI/CD pipelines for data workloads.
- Familiarity with lakehouse formats like Parquet, including partitioning and compaction strategies.
- Expertise in data observability, including freshness and volume alerts, lineage tracking, and failure diagnostics.
- Experience with BI tools such as Tableau.
- Handling of PII and regulated financial data, including masking, tokenization, and access control.
- Background in fintech, payments, or other regulated, high-trust industries.

Additional Information
SadaPay offers a USD-denominated salary paid in PKR to protect against currency fluctuations, a hybrid work culture with flexible remote and office days, and a flexible leave policy supporting work-life balance. Comprehensive medical insurance covers employees and their immediate family, along with provident fund contributions to support financial growth. Each team member is provided with the necessary technology and resources to perform their role effectively.

SadaPay is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful workplace free from discrimination. The company values diversity and ensures fairness throughout its recruitment process.

Department: Technology
Location: Karachi (preferred), Islamabad, Lahore
Employment Type: Full Time