Data Engineer

About Inkomoko

Inkomoko is dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs to expand their businesses, enhancing livelihoods, creating employment, and fostering thriving communities. Recognized in 2026 by the Financial Times as the 5th fastest-growing company in Africa, Inkomoko supports entrepreneurs across East and Central Africa, promoting inclusive and resilient economic growth.

Established in 2012, the organization has collaborated with over 100,000 entrepreneurs, including thousands of refugees. It offers training, consulting, financing, and market-driven system changes. Inkomoko is the leading investor in refugee entrepreneurs in Africa with a staff strength exceeding 900 in 50 offices spanning Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Sudan. Its 2030 strategic vision includes expansion into three more countries, aiming to serve over 550,000 entrepreneurs and growing a $30 million loan fund to impact 7 million lives.

Core Values

• Purpose: Strive to be solution-focused, deliver excellence, and lead globally.
• Achievement: Challenge oneself to exceed former capabilities.
• Improvement: Embrace humility, continual learning through constructive feedback.
• Bravery: Take risks, foster safe and inclusive environments, show compassion.
• Team Spirit (We Eat Goat): Celebrate successes, support one another, work collaboratively under principles like turikumwe and tuko pamoja.

Inkomoko practices equal opportunity and affirmative action; it strongly encourages applications from refugees, women, and populations representing the communities served.

Opportunity Overview

The Data Engineer is responsible for constructing and operating data pipelines at the heart of Inkomoko's enterprise data platform, guaranteeing reliable, secure, and scalable data for analytics, AI, product development, operations, and decision-making. Working under the Senior Data Engineer's architecture guidelines, the role offers prospects for increasing ownership accompanied by structured mentorship.

The role involves tackling complex tasks such as contributing to the client entity resolution layer linking individuals across advisory, banking, and survey systems with transparency, auditability, and data quality assurance. The Data Engineer ensures strict compliance with organizational data protection standards and ingests only necessary data columns.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, maintain, and operate dependable, auditable data pipelines integrating enterprise, lending, programmatic, survey, and external sources while adhering to platform standards.
• Ensure data loads are idempotent and checkpointed for efficient resumptions, and thoroughly document pipelines as code.
• Enforce minimum data ingestion to protect sensitive information, applying reusable integration patterns, and responsibly flag mismatches.
• Implement pipeline tests, contracts, and freshness verifications that enforce quality gates, halting downstream processes and alerting teams upon failure.
• Monitor pipeline performance, health, and costs using observability tools, responding to incidents within defined service levels, and executing root cause analysis with constructive documentation.
• Contribute to the client entity resolution design by implementing matching logic, survivorship rules, and maintaining auditable merge decision logs; investigate discrepancies with clear evidence reporting.
• Comply with data governance frameworks covering classification, access control, lineage, retention, encryption, minimization, and audit trails; ensure adherence to applicable data protection laws, collaborating with central access administration.
• Coordinate with Technology Enablement, Product and Innovation, MERL, and business system stakeholders on changes to source systems and data dependencies.
• Participate actively in mentorship via code reviews, pairing sessions, and executing growth plans overseen by the Senior Data Engineer.

Qualifications and Experience

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or related disciplines, or equivalent demonstrable experience.
• Between 2 to 4 years of experience in data or backend engineering with substantial exposure to production-level data workflows.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL for software-quality pipeline development, including testing.
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL; familiarity with SQL Server is advantageous.
• Practical experience with dbt for data transformation and orchestration; knowledge of modern orchestrators such as Dagster preferred or Airflow as a background.
• Understanding of incremental and idempotent data loading techniques; knowledge of Kafka and Spark is a plus.
• Strong habits in Git workflows, continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), containerization technologies such as Docker, and well-maintained documentation practices.
• Awareness of managing sensitive personal data responsibly, preferably including experience with regulated environments like financial or humanitarian data.
• A demonstrated commitment to seek and implement feedback within a structured mentorship framework.
• Excellent communication skills, able to clearly articulate pipeline functionality, issues encountered, and modifications made in writing.

Core Competencies

• Demonstrates reliability by honoring commitments, communicating honestly, and showing genuine concern for colleagues.
• Exhibits courage through openly addressing challenges, proactively pursuing opportunities, and taking full responsibility for one’s work.
• Makes decisions based on appropriate data and inputs, acting suitably within role scope and escalating when necessary.

Benefits

• Contribute to impactful work fostering sustainable livelihoods and job creation across East and Central Africa.
• Competitive remuneration and eligibility for performance-based bonuses.
• A vibrant organizational culture promoting learning, growth, inclusion, and equity.
• A diverse workplace with regional colleagues and inclusive policies.
• Dynamic, entrepreneurial workplace committed to social innovation and impact.
• Comprehensive health insurance coverage for employees and their families.
• Access to staff savings schemes, provident funds, and bank rate negotiations for long-tenured staff.
• Generous leave provisions including annual, parental, and sabbatical leave options.

Additional Information

Inkomoko values justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion; refugees and women are encouraged to apply. Employment offers depend on successful background and reference checks, including participation in the Inter Agency Misconduct Disclosure Scheme requiring disclosure of any findings such as sexual misconduct, fraud, or abuse recorded by previous employers.

Only candidates shortlisted will be contacted.