Location Data Lead

Zutari is a multinational buildings infrastructure engineering and advisory firm with over 90 years of experience across Africa and the Middle East. We partner with clients across the full infrastructure lifecycle delivering digitally driven solutions that shape schools stadiums dams bridges and the systems that connect them.

We are enablers of progress transforming ambition into impact and infrastructure into opportunity. Every role in Zutari contributes to building sustainable futures that extend far beyond the projects themselves.

Role overview

Zutaris Digital Practice team is expanding its data practice and requires a location lead in Tshwane. The team delivers innovative solutions across the business for internal and external clients across various industries e.g. energy transport water and buildings. Working at the intersection of engineering and technology the team partners with multi-disciplinary engineering teams BIM and IoT specialists to connect static 3D and asset data with real-time information to help clients solve interesting and complex problems.

Role responsibilities

• Lead and build a data team in Tshwane with assistance from the Zutari Data Lead.
• Collaborate across cross-functional teams to deliver multiple concurrent data and analytics projects.
• Ingest and consolidate raw data from diverse sources including Building Information Modelling (BIM) IoT sensors and ERP systems.
• Design build and maintain scalable data architectures and end-to-end data pipelines.
• Perform data analysis and develop BI analytical tools to surface actionable insights for stakeholders.
• Research prototype and validate machine learning and AI proof-of-concepts to address business challenges.

Minimum requirements

• Leadership experience leading data professionals
• A can-do attitude and genuine passion for applying data in engineering and infrastructure domains
• Bachelors degree in Engineering Computer Science or a related field
• At least 8 years experience in data engineering and/or data science
• At least 2 years leading a team
• Fluent in Python and GIT version control
• Hands-on experience with SQL databases data warehousing and data pipeline design
• Ability to communicate complex technical findings clearly to non-technical engineering stakeholders - both in writing and in presentations
• Comfortable leading technical decisions on a workstream and collaborating across multidisciplinary teams (BIM IoT engineering business functions)

Advantageous

• Masters or higher qualification
• Experience in infrastructure sectors (energy water transport or buildings)
• Understanding of asset lifecycle data and digital twin concepts including semantic data modelling or ontologies
• Software development experience
• Experience with Docker for containerisation and deployment of data applications
• Experience with BIM data formats (IFC) or integration with BIM platforms
• Data engineering certification
• Software development and software engineering best practices
• Leveraging Claude Code (or similar) to increase output
• Proven experience building and deploying ML/AI solutions beyond proof-of-concept
• Cloud and data platform experience: Snowflake Microsoft Fabric Databricks BigQuery or similar
• MQTT / SCADA / industrial IoT protocols (e.g. Sparkplug B OPC-UA Modbus)
• Streaming and real-time pipeline experience (Kafka Spark Streaming or similar)
• Experience working with time-series data and/or IoT data streams (e.g. InfluxDB TimescaleDB or similar)
• Familiarity with geospatial data and tools (e.g. GeoPandas PostGIS or similar)
  
  We believe that a diverse workforce is key to our business success. We seek the best people for our jobs based on their skills qualifications and experience. We embrace the principle of equal opportunity in employment and work towards eliminating all forms of unlawful discrimination in our employment support of diversity and the equal opportunity principle preference will be given to individuals from designated groups in South Africa.