Senior Data Engineer

Kohort|Posted 1 day ago

Skills and experience

Role:Data engineer

Other roles:Backend engineer, Machine learning engineer

Experience in role:5+ years

Language proficiency:English

Must-have skills:

Python

Polars

SQL

Nice-to-have skills:

AWS

TypeScript

pandas

Google Cloud

BigQuery

Snowflake

Location and salary

Remote policy:Remote

Location of job:Anywhere

Visa requirements:Authorised to work in South Africa With status of citizen/passport holder or permanent resident

Visa sponsorship:Unable to sponsor visa

Employment type:Permanent

Role description

You'll be at the heart of our data platform, building and maintaining the pipelines and backend systems that power our ML-driven analytics for the mobile gaming industry. Your role involves designing reliable, scalable pipelines that ingest and transform petabyte-scale gaming data, ensuring investment-grade data quality through robust validation and monitoring, and optimizing performance across our platform. You'll take technical leadership in scoping and planning new features, working alongside data scientists, product managers, and fellow developers to deliver quality products that help game studios optimize billions in user acquisition spend. We're a pre-Series A startup solving a $6bn problem in mobile gaming, backed by tier-1 VCs like Index and CVC, with $8bn in deal value under our belt. Our team brings expertise from King, Sensor Tower, Tripledot, Bloomberg, and other industry leaders. You'll work in a zero-politics, high-energy environment where your impact is immediate and visible, collaborating with the biggest game studios and on major gaming PE and VC deals. This is your chance to do the defining work of your career while being part of a company accelerating at startup speed. We offer a competitive salary, Employee Share Scheme, and comprehensive benefits including income protection, life cover, wellbeing rewards, and an Employee Assistance Program. You'll work in a remote-first setup with offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London, plus several company-wide gatherings throughout the year. Join us on the ground floor and help build both cutting-edge technology and a company that's transforming how the gaming industry makes investment decisions.

About Kohort

15-50 employees

What We Do

Kohort is the leading machine learning platform for mobile gaming user acquisition optimisation and financial planning. We provide game studios with investment-grade LTV predictions using petabyte-scale data and machine learning.

We are a group of gaming and data experts from King, Sensor Tower, Tripledot, Mistplay, Bloomberg and Football Radar. Our clients range from large, listed developers and publishers to up-and-coming start-ups building at the cutting edge of mobile gaming.

We add value to customers by helping them optimise UA spend on a day-to-day basis and then creating financial plans to accomplish strategic finance goals - from VC raises to IPO prep.

Our platform is investment grade; to date, we are the analytics partners of tier-1 VCs such as Index and CVC, and managed $8bn in deal value.

Why Work For Us

We consist of industry veterans and experienced tech company founders with successful venture exits. Our founding team consists of:

We've landed globally-known companies and been invested into by large US and UK VCs

Our Culture

Career acceleration: We are accelerating as only a startup can. Join us in a zero-politics, no-drama, high-energy, impact-focused environment on the ground floor.

Do the defining work of your career: We are working on a $6bn problem. That’s how much UA spend is wasted in mobile gaming each year. Did that make your blood boil? Sounds crazy? Wasteful? Let’s fix it together.

We live and breathe gaming: You’ll get to work with the biggest game studios and on the biggest gaming PE and VC deals. We also, of course, have frequent COD Mobile competitions.

Our Engineering Processes

ML engineers own the full lifecycle: from data exploration and model prototyping to deployment, monitoring, and iteration in production. We ship fast using a pragmatic, CI/CD-driven process with strong testing, observability, and model/version control. Teams operate in vertical squads with product, design, and data science, focused on delivering measurable impact. We balance velocity and rigor — building reusable ML systems, not one-off pipelines, and iterating quickly based on real user feedback.

Our Hiring Process

We perform an initial interview to gauge fit with Head of Engineering/Data Science, followed by 2 technical interviews, followed by a interview with the C-suite.

AI Focus

ML and AI are the core of what we do. We have a big drive to continually adjust to the new reality and adopting all the latest tools, thinking and building our own Agents