Associate Data Platform Engineer

Role details

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 an Associate Data Platform Engineer ready to build real distributed systems skills on large-scale production data. Our platform powers analytics, ML, and data products at TB–PB scale using Scala, Python, Spark, Kafka, Airflow, and BigQuery on GCP. This is a foundational role for someone early in their career who wants to learn how serious data infrastructure is built and operated, with mentorship from experienced engineers and clear patterns to follow. You'll work within the Data Analytics Group (DAG) alongside Analytics Engineers, Data Analysts, and Data Scientists, though you won't own dbt models, metric definitions, or reporting. Our ideal candidate has strong programming and SQL fundamentals, genuine curiosity about how systems behave under load, and good judgement about when to ask for help. 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: Pipeline development: Build and extend batch and streaming pipeline components under guidance. Write clean, tested Scala and Python code. Add Spark transformation steps, build Airflow DAGs, and implement Kafka consumers with senior support. Platform configuration: Configure platform components such as BigQuery tables, partitioning strategies, and Cloud Storage buckets with guidance. Observability & data quality: Build monitoring dashboards and alerting for job success, latency, and pipeline health. Implement data quality checks to catch anomalies, schema violations, and missing data. Operations & incident response: Shadow the on-call rotation, help investigate root causes, debug using logs, metrics, and traces, and maintain runbooks and operational documentation. Security, governance & cost awareness: Follow least-privilege access, secrets management, and PII handling by default. Consider the cost and performance implications of your changes with guidance. Collaboration & craft: Use AI coding assistants while holding the same quality and review standards. Participate in code reviews, pairing, and technical discussions, and communicate progress and blockers clearly. What You Have: Preferred Requirements: 1–3 years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or a related technical role Working programming ability in Scala, Java, or Python, with an appetite to become strong in both Scala and Python Solid SQL fundamentals: joins, aggregations, window functions, and an understanding of query behaviour Understanding of data structures, algorithms, and software engineering basics, including Git and collaborative development workflows Exposure to or eagerness to learn distributed processing (Spark), streaming (Kafka or Pub/Sub), orchestration (Airflow), and a major cloud platform, ideally GCP (BigQuery, Dataproc, Cloud Storage) Strong problem-solving instincts and a methodical approach to debugging Clear written and verbal communication, suited to an async-first distributed team Willingness to participate in on-call learning and operational work Nice to Have (Advantageous) Requirements: Internship, academic, or personal project experience building data pipelines Exposure to CI/CD, automated testing, or infrastructure as code Familiarity with data formats such as Parquet, Avro, or JSON Exposure to dbt, Looker, or BI tooling Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field is a plus Experience in the digital marketing technology industry is a plus Benefits and Perks: At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance. Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life. Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year , with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health. A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval. Investing in Your Growth: We’re commi