Senior Data Engineer
@ Food for Education

Title: Senior Data Engineer

Location: Nairobi

About Food 4 Education

Food for Education (F4E) is an African-led, women-led social enterprise that uses technology, smart operations and logistics to provide low-cost, high-quality meals that improve nutrition and education outcomes for primary school children in Kenya.

We are growing quickly. Our mission is to scale models that prioritise efficient supply chain management and sustainable sourcing, so we can continue lowering the cost of school lunches. We have delivered over 100,000,000 meals since 2012 and are expanding to reach our goal of serving at least 1,000,000 public primary school students in Kenya every day by 2027.

Position Overview

We're looking for a skilled Data Engineer to help us transform our food service data infrastructure from the ground up. You'll be responsible for building efficient data pipelines that integrate our tap2Eat system with meals data in BigQuery, enabling powerful business insights across the organization. This is a hands-on technical role where you'll design, implement, and optimize our entire data engineering ecosystem.

Key responsibilities:

• Build scalable ETL/ELT pipelines using Apache Airflow to integrate data from various sources including relational databases, Google Sheets, and unstructured data into BigQuery.
• Design and implement an optimized data model for storing and analyzing food service data, with a focus on query performance and cost efficiency.
• Develop transformation scripts that clean, standardize, and enrich our tap2Eat system data with meals nutritional information.
• Engineer partitioning and clustering strategies for BigQuery tables to ensure optimal performance and cost management.
• Create and maintain data quality frameworks to ensure data accuracy, completeness, and reliability.
• Develop automated data pipeline monitoring to proactively identify and resolve issues.
• Optimize SQL queries and views to support the BI team in creating insightful dashboards.
• Document data pipelines and data models to ensure knowledge sharing across teams.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to understand business requirements and translate them into technical implementations.

What You'll Need

Technical Skills:

• 4+ years of experience in data engineering roles.
• Strong proficiency with Python and SQL.
• Experience with Apache Airflow or similar workflow orchestration tools.
• Demonstrated expertise with BigQuery or similar cloud data warehouses.
• Knowledge of data modeling and dimensional design principles.
• Experience with real-time and batch data processing patterns.
• Understanding of data quality best practices and implementation methods.
• Familiarity with version control systems (Git) and CI/CD practices.

Background and Education:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Statistics, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience working with food service data is a plus, but not required.

Personal Qualities:

• Problem-solver who can optimize complex data workflows for efficiency and cost.
• Strong communicator who can explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Detail-oriented with a commitment to data quality and integrity.
• Self-motivated learner who stays current with evolving data technologies.
• Collaborative team player who works effectively with BI analysts and business users.

Success in This Role Means

• Building data pipelines that achieve >99.5% data completeness with <0.1% error rates.
• Creating a BigQuery infrastructure that processes daily data in <45 minutes.
• Designing table structures that allow 95% of BI queries to complete in <5 seconds.
• Implementing efficient data flows that keep compute costs under budget.
• Enabling the BI team to build dashboards that refresh in <30 seconds.
• Establishing a data foundation that can scale to 10x current volumes without redesign.

Why You'll Love Working Here

• Opportunity to architect a data system from the ground up.
• Collaborative environment where your technical input shapes business decisions.
• Modern tech stack leveraging cloud-native tools and best practices.
• Clear success metrics that showcase your impact on the organization.
• Supportive team focused on continuous learning and growth.

We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, colour, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

Career Growth and Development

We have a strong culture of constant learning and we invest in developing our people. You will have weekly check-ins with your manager, and regular feedback on your performance. We hold career reviews every six months and set aside time to discuss your aspirations and career goals. You will have the opportunity to shape a growing organisation and build a rewarding, long-term career.

We aim to contact all our applicants, but due to the high volume of applications only shortlisted candidates are contacted. If you do not hear from us within two weeks your application might not be successful on this occasion. This does not mean you will not be considered for future roles so please keep an eye on our job board and apply for positions that match your skills and experience.