---
title: 'Data Platform Engineer at Impact.com'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-platform-engineer-impact-com-cape-town-w6ecqrw8frzz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-01'
---

# Data Platform Engineer at Impact.com

- **Company:** Impact.com
- **Location:** Cape Town, South Africa
- **Posted:** 2026-10-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-01
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/impact/jobs/8867903002

## Job description

## About impact.com

[impact.com](http://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](http://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](http://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](http://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 a Data Platform Engineer ready to independently own production pipelines and platform components at TB-scale, delivering data reliably, securely, and cost-effectively as the business grows.

You'll design and build scalable batch and streaming pipelines, own the reliability, performance, and SLOs of your domain, and participate fully in on-call as a Tier 2 responder. You'll work within the Data Analytics Group (DAG), partnering closely with Analytics Engineers, Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and Data Product Managers, though you won't own dbt models, metric definitions, or reporting. We operate with a platform-as-a-product mindset: the platform is an internal product with clear interfaces, paved roads, and strong developer experience, and success is measured by the productivity of the teams who depend on it. Our ideal candidate combines solid distributed systems engineering with operational maturity, clear communication, and a habit of mentoring those earlier in their careers. 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:

- End-to-end domain ownership: Own platform components and a pipeline domain end-to-end, including design, implementation, reliability, performance, and cost. Design and build scalable ETL/ELT and streaming pipelines using Spark/Dataproc, Kafka, and Pub/Sub. Integrate diverse sources into BigQuery and other stores. Build modular, fault-tolerant components with graceful schema evolution.
- Infrastructure & performance tuning: Configure and maintain core platform infrastructure as code, including Dataproc, Kafka, Airflow/Astronomer, BigQuery, and Cloud Storage. Tune performance and cost through query optimisation, partitioning, and resource configuration. Tune streaming configurations for throughput and reliability.
- Reliability & incident response: Own and track SLOs for freshness, success, and latency. Implement monitoring, alerting, and data quality checks. Participate in on-call as a Tier 2 responder, troubleshooting and resolving incidents independently.
- Security, governance & self-service: Implement security and governance by design, including access control, secrets, encryption, audit logging, lineage, and retention. Build self-service capabilities and paved roads for analytics engineers, analysts, and data scientists.
- Engineering craft & documentation: Write clean, well-tested code with CI/CD and current runbooks and architecture docs. Use AI coding assistants while holding the same quality and review standards.
- Mentorship & communication: Mentor Associate Data Platform Engineers through pairing and code review. Communicate platform trade-offs clearly and contribute to platform standards and data contracts.

What You Have:

Preferred Requirements:

- 3 to 5 years of experience in data platform, data engineering, or backend/distributed systems engineering, including ownership of production systems at TB-scale, or systems carrying stringent SLAs, multiple downstream consumers, or compliance requirements
- Strong Python, plus production experience in a JVM language, with the ability to write production-quality code with proper error handling, logging, and testing. Scala is our primary pipeline language: if you don't have it yet, you'll need a real appetite to become strong in it
- Hands-on depth in either distributed batch processing (Spark: DataFrames, Spark SQL, partitioning, shuffles, fault tolerance) or streaming (Kafka or Pub/Sub: producers, consumers, topics, partitions, stream processing patterns), with working familiarity of the other
- Advanced SQL, including complex queries, window functions, CTEs, and query optimisation
- Experience with workflow orchestration such as Airflow: scheduling, dependencies, retry logic, and workflow coordination
- Working fluency with a major cloud platform, ideally GCP (BigQuery, Dataproc, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub)
- Solid engineering and operational practice: Git, CI/CD, automated testing, code review, monitoring, alerting, and incident response including on-call
- Security and governance practice in data systems: access control, secrets management, encryption, and least-privilege design
- Clear written and verbal communication for a distributed team, plus some experience or aptitude for mentoring less experienced engineers

Nice to Have (Advantageous) Requirements:

- Infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent) and automated deployment
- Experience migrating legacy big-data platforms onto cloud-native alternatives
- Familiarity with dbt, Looker, or semantic layer concepts, and with dbt orchestration through Astronomer Cosmos
- Functional Scala patterns (cats-effect and the Typelevel ecosystem), or JVM tuning exposure such as garbage collection, memory management, and thread pools
- Observability tooling such as Grafana, Datadog, or Cloud Monitoring
- Experience with Dataflow (Apache Beam), SingleStore, or BigTable
- 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 committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.
- Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
- Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses

impact.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non-merit factors.

## #LI-CT1

## About Impact.com

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Impact.com is the world’s leading partnership management platform, enabling enterprises to discover, manage, track, and optimize all types of partnerships—from affiliates and influencers to strategic brand alliances—powered by AI and a $100B+ commerce network.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Growth-stage, backed by prominent venture capital)
- **Headquarters**: Santa Barbara, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2008
- **Founders**: David A. Yovanno (CEO), Todd Crawford, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Partnership Marketing Technology (SaaS), Affiliate Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Commerce Technology
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (over 5,000 global brands including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To create impact through partnerships by transforming the way enterprises manage and optimize all types of partnerships.

## Products & Services
- **Impact.com Platform (Core SaaS)**: An AI-native, all-in-one partnership management platform that unifies affiliate, creator, and referral programs. It covers the full partnership lifecycle: Discover & Recruit, Track, Engage, Contract & Pay, Protect & Monitor, and Optimize.
- **TrueLink™**: A proprietary cross-device tracking technology that provides a complete view of the customer journey while prioritizing privacy.
- **AI-Powered Optimization**: Predictive analytics and machine learning tools to evaluate partner value, assess customer lifetime value, and optimize performance across the partnership network.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company). The company has raised significant growth capital from top-tier investors.
- **Key Metric**: Over 5,000 global brands use the platform, managing more than 225,000 active partnerships. The platform powers over $100B in partnership commerce annually.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Backed by prominent venture capital firms (specific names not listed in provided sources, but widely reported as including growth equity investors). Key customers include Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics.
- **Growth Signals**: 1,000+ employees across 21 global offices; 20+ nationalities represented; actively hiring for 84+ roles across engineering, data science, product, marketing, and sales; expanding AI capabilities (e.g., Internal Systems Engineer for Applied AI, Principal Data Scientist for Fraud Modelling).

## Competitive Advantages
- **All-in-One Platform**: Unifies affiliate, influencer, and referral programs in a single dashboard, eliminating the need for multiple tools and fragmented data.
- **AI-Native & Data-Rich**: Leverages AI to predict partner value, assess customer lifetime value, and optimize performance, powered by a network of over $100B in partnership commerce.
- **Full-Stack Protection**: Built-in fraud detection, compliance monitoring, and traffic quality analysis to protect brand integrity and maximize ROI.
- **Proprietary Tracking (TrueLink™)**: Cross-device, privacy-first tracking that provides a complete picture of partner-driven conversions.
- **Scale & Trust**: Trusted by over 5,000 global brands including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI-First Innovation**: Deep investment in AI and machine learning, including roles for Applied AI, Next Gen Recommendation Systems, and Fraud Modelling, to further automate and optimize partnership performance.
- **Global Expansion**: Continued growth of its 21 global offices and hiring across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa to support a diverse, international customer base.
- **Platform Unification**: Driving the industry shift from siloed affiliate, influencer, and referral tools to a single, unified partnership management platform.
- **Enterprise Scale**: Deepening relationships with large enterprise clients and expanding the platform’s capabilities to serve the world’s biggest brands.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Mission**: Described as a global community of “growth technologists” who are adaptable, passionate, and collaborative. The company emphasizes science and technology to create transformational growth.
- **Remote/Hybrid/Office Policy**: Flexible working policy with work-from-home opportunities. Many roles are listed as hybrid or remote (e.g., “Hybrid” in New York City, “Remote (US)”). The policy is tailored to each role and location.
- **Notable Perks**:
    - **Work-Life Balance**: Flexible, unlimited time-off policy.
    - **Family Matters**: Paid family leave for both birthing and non-birthing parents.
    - **Health & Wellness**: Inclusive, comprehensive healthcare plans for employees and their families.
    - **Financial Growth**: Company-matched retirement plans and company stock options.
    - **Professional Development**: A wide variety of professional development courses and training.
    - **Global Community**: 20+ nationalities represented; strong emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- **Engineering Culture**: Heavy investment in AI, data science, and platform engineering. Roles include Data Scientist (Next Gen Recommendation Systems), Principal Data Scientist (Fraud Modelling), and Internal Systems Engineer (Applied AI), indicating a sophisticated, data-driven engineering environment.

## Sources
1. [impact.com](https://impact.com/)
2. [impact.com About](https://impact.com/about/)
3. [impact.com Careers](https://impact.com/careers/)
4. [impact.com Greenhouse Job Board](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/impact)
5. [impact.com LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/impactdotcom)

## Other roles at Impact.com

- [Machine Learning Ops Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-ops-engineer-impact-com-cape-town-76awr29jskzd) — Cape Town, South Africa
- [Partnership Trust & Safety Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/partnership-trust-safety-manager-impact-com-seattle-victoria-cnzee54wcsdq) — Seattle Victoria, NY
- [Marketplace Growth Lifecycle Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/marketplace-growth-lifecycle-manager-impact-com-cape-town-6gahfcc81f3a) — Cape Town, South Africa
- [Senior API Data Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-api-data-analyst-impact-com-cape-town-aq0rf2ssyx2h) — Cape Town, South Africa
- [Solutions Consultant](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-consultant-impact-com-remote-t3zwya6kts9q)
- [FP&A Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/fp-a-associate-impact-com-cape-town-2b0ymjdgy7p6) — Cape Town, South Africa
- [Creator Productivity Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/creator-productivity-manager-impact-com-kuala-lumpur-4pn4hqtc25qq) — Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- [Associate Data Platform Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/associate-data-platform-engineer-impact-com-cape-town-8p00h411dgsg) — Cape Town, South Africa
- [Program Compliance Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/program-compliance-manager-impact-com-remote-tfvacn3wj98h)
- [Senior Revenue Operations Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-revenue-operations-analyst-impact-com-new-york-4vbmr1c0bv7j) — New York, NY