Data Engineer, Smile Identity
Africa-focused verification platform
Job no longer available
Africa-focused verification platform
21-100 employees
Job no longer available
21-100 employees
Company mission
Smile Identity's mission is to make the benefits of a modern digital lifestyle universally accessible by expanding trust in underserved markets.
Role
Who you are
- 4+ years experience with data infrastructure, ETL design, data warehousing, schema design and dimensional data modeling
- 2+ years of experience in SQL, Python, or similar languages
- Experience with designing and implementing real-time pipelines
- Experience with code management tooling such as Git, Github
- Experience with data migrations in production settings
- You have a deep understanding of modern data tooling and infrastructure
- You are comfortable working independently with periodic guidance from engineering & business teams
- You are a strong believer in scale and automation
- You are entrepreneurial — you take initiative, solve problems and love to troubleshoot
- You are a great collaborator and can communicate effectively. You enjoy teaching and learning from your colleagues
- You are not ideological about programming languages or tools. You have opinions but are open to discussion and tradeoffs
- You are a pragmatist
- You are a seeker of truth
Desirable
- Experience querying big data using Spark, Presto, Hive, Impala, etc
- Experience with data quality and validation
- Experience with SQL performance tuning and E2E process optimization
- Experience creating reports and dashboards with modern business intelligence tools (Tableau, Metabase preferred)
- Experience working with Postgres, Hevo, and cloud or on-prem Big Data/MPP analytics platform (i.e. Snowflake, AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, Azure Data Warehouse, Netezza, Teradata, or similar)
- Interest or experience in working in the African Fintech Ecosystem
- Experience in a high-growth team and/or startup experience
- Ability to communicate and prioritise effectively with a distributed team around the world
What the job involves
- Work with our entire organization based in the US, London, Berlin, Lagos, Nairobi, and Cape Town to centralize our data and maintain our data warehouses/lakes
- You will select the right tools and services to bring our data together and provide a solid foundation for all our product and business analytics. Your north star? Empowering the entire organization with data to make the best possible decisions
- Design, build and launch extremely efficient and reliable data pipelines to move data
- Architect, build and launch new data models that provide intuitive analytics
- Manage the delivery of high impact dashboards, tools and data visualizations
- Build data expertise and own data quality, including defining and managing SLAs for data sets
- Partner with leadership, engineers, commercial, and data scientists to understand data needs
- Influence short- and long-term strategy with cross-functional teams to drive impact
- Educate your partners: Use your data and analytics experience to discover opportunities, identifying and addressing gaps in existing logging and processes
Our take
An estimated half a billion Africans have no access to formal identification, cutting them off from essential services. Smile Identity uses artificial intelligence to provide ID verification and Know Your Client (KYC) compliance for African financial institutions.
Smile’s product-market fit took some time. With no playbook to follow, it continues to carve out innovative solutions for a systematically overlooked community. Within four years of conception, Smile existed across six markets in Africa, covering over 250 million identities and verification for 15 different types of IDs, whilst delivering over one million identity checks each month - successfully securing its goal of reaching underserved markets.
Whilst competitor Youverify claims to be the market leader in ID verification, Smile is growing its market position, and is used by many fast growing companies across a wide range of industries. With integrations to more ID databases than any other KYC provider in Africa, and fresh funding for expanding its product and engineering teams, Smile Identity has proved its abilities and positioned itself well to expand into the future.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
15% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Feb 2023
$20m
SERIES B
Jul 2021
$7m
SERIES A
Total funding: $35m
Company benefits
- Offices in Cape Town, London, Nairobi and Lagos
- Annual off-site & quarterly regional hangouts
- Company sponsored health insurance plans or medical stipend where applicable
- Annual salary reviews
- Flexible hours and remote/hybrid work
- Paid time-off - our comprehensive leave policy caters to different leave types
- Referral Bonus
- Annual learning budget
Company HQ
Produce and Waterfront, Oakland, CA
Leadership
Mark Straub
(CEO)Khosla Impact Partner. Former Analyst at Banc of America Securities and India-based microfinance venture firm Lok Capital. Before co-founding Smile Identity they were an Associate & Analyst for the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund.
William Bares
(Senior Advisor)Was the company's CTO from foundation, stepping into an advisory role in 2022. Previously spent seven years as VP Software and System Engineering at Verayo.
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