Data Engineer
Company: Barrows Global
Department: Connected Store
Location: Cape Town
About Barrows Global
Moving Retail Forward | Moving People Forward | Moving Communities Forward
With over 30 years of experience, Barrows Global is one of the world’s leading retail design and manufacturing businesses, with offices in Durban, Cape Town, London, New York, and Toronto. We harness the potential of our people, the quality of our products, and the spirit of our organisation to create transformative retail experiences worldwide.
We are vertically integrated, offering services that span across:
- Strategy and sales
- Design and engineering
- Manufacturing and installation
- In-trade maintenance and asset tracking
- Software development
- Multimedia content creation
- Data analytics
- Sustainable product development
Specialising in the FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) point-of-purchase space, we serve over 80 blue-chip clients globally.
Barrows is built on strong values and relationships, fostering an environment where thinkers, makers, doers, and innovators thrive. Our employees are united by their can-do attitude, determination, and passion for purpose-driven work.
About Connected Store
Connected Store is our digital advertising channel for retail. Over the past two years, we have scaled our network to over 10,000 digital, dynamic, interactive, and localisable in-store advertising spaces. We design, build, fund, and install digital touchpoints while managing our media platform's physical assets, digital devices, and content.
Our vision is to seamlessly integrate digital media, physical points of sale, and products—enabling brands to deliver dynamic, contextually relevant shopper experiences that drive sales uplift and create market differentiation.
As we continue to pioneer in the retail media space and scale our product-as-a-service offering, we are looking for talented and driven individuals to join our Connected Store Software Engineering Team.
About the Role
We are seeking a skilled Data Engineer to join our team and contribute to the development and maintenance of our Connected Store retail media network. You will be responsible for designing and optimizing data pipelines, ensuring efficient ETL processes, and working with large-scale data architectures to support our data-driven operations.
As a Data Engineer, you will work closely with cross-functional teams, ensuring the integrity, security, and scalability of our data systems. You will play a key role in developing data solutions, conducting research on emerging technologies, and maintaining high-performance, reliable data infrastructure.
Responsibilities
Data Architecture & Development
- Design, develop, and maintain scalable ETL pipelines for collecting, processing, and storing large datasets.
- Implement efficient data models to support business intelligence and analytics.
- Ensure data accuracy, consistency, and integrity across multiple sources and platforms.
- Optimise database performance and implement best practices for data security and governance.
Technology & Infrastructure
- Work with cloud-based data platforms (e.g., Google Cloud Platform, BigQuery) to store and process data.
- Build and maintain high-performance data storage solutions using relational ( MySQL, SQL) and non-relational databases (MongoDB, NoSQL).
- Develop and maintain distributed data processing frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark, Hadoop).
- Monitor data pipeline performance, troubleshoot issues, and implement improvements.
Collaboration & Continuous Improvement
- Work closely with software engineers, data analysts, and business teams to design and implement data solutions.
- Conduct research on emerging data technologies and recommend innovative improvements.
- Establish development, staging, and production environments, ensuring smooth deployments.
- Ensure that all code is well-documented, modular, and adheres to best practices.
Quality Assurance & Support
- Implement testing frameworks to validate data pipelines, transformations, and integrations.
- Monitor system performance metrics, ensuring optimal efficiency and quick issue resolution.
- Provide production support, troubleshoot escalated issues, and implement long-term solutions.
- Conduct routine maintenance to proactively address potential issues.