Data Platform Engineer

About the role

About impact.com

impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products—Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands, including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics, rely on impact.com to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at Impact:

Impact's Data Platform Engineering team is looking for a Data Platform Engineer ready to independently own production pipelines and platform components at TB-scale, delivering data reliably, securely, and cost-effectively as the business grows.

You'll design and build scalable batch and streaming pipelines, own the reliability, performance, and SLOs of your domain, and participate fully in on-call as a Tier 2 responder. You'll work within the Data Analytics Group (DAG), partnering closely with Analytics Engineers, Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and Data Product Managers, though you won't own dbt models, metric definitions, or reporting. We operate with a platform-as-a-product mindset: the platform is an internal product with clear interfaces, paved roads, and strong developer experience, and success is measured by the productivity of the teams who depend on it. Our ideal candidate combines solid distributed systems engineering with operational maturity, clear communication, and a habit of mentoring those earlier in their careers. The role reports to the Team Lead, Data Platform Engineering, and is based in Cape Town, hybrid, with two days per week in office.

The platform:

The platform has strong foundations: Scala and Spark pipelines processing TB-scale data, dozens of managed data connectors, Airflow on Astronomer for orchestration, a mature dbt transformation layer, and BigQuery as the core analytical warehouse. You'll also have room to shape the platform's next chapter: modernising parts of the compute stack, and building out governance frameworks, data contracts, SLOs, observability, cost management, and data quality monitoring within your domain.

What You'll Do:

- End-to-end domain ownership: Own platform components and a pipeline domain end-to-end, including design, implementation, reliability, performance, and cost. Design and build scalable ETL/ELT and streaming pipelines using Spark/Dataproc, Kafka, and Pub/Sub. Integrate diverse sources into BigQuery and other stores. Build modular, fault-tolerant components with graceful schema evolution.