About Duck
Duck builds data access layers for African retail. We connect into supermarket systems to pull sales and inventory data, then turn it into commercial intelligence for FMCG brands and retailers across East Africa. We have live retailer partnerships and are growing fast.

The Role
We're looking for a Data Engineer on a contract basis (1–3 months) to build the core data infrastructure behind our product.

You'll be working directly with the founding team to build the full data lifecycle: ingestion, cleaning, storage, transformation, and output — including APIs that serve data to our dashboards and automated reports for clients.

We're running on Azure, so familiarity with Azure services is a plus — but strong data engineering fundamentals on any cloud platform are what matter most.

What You'll Do

• Build a system for receiving and ingesting raw data files
• Clean, validate, and standardise data into a consistent structure
• Design and implement transformation logic that turns raw retail data into meaningful commercial outputs
• Build and maintain data storage that supports both API access and report generation
• Create APIs that serve transformed data to a client-facing dashboard (built by a separate developer)
• Build automated report generation pipelines that produce formatted reports on a scheduled basis
• Set up monitoring and alerting so you know when data stops flowing or quality drops
• Document what you build so the next person can pick it up

What We're Looking For

• Strong experience building data pipelines (ETL/ELT) in a production environment
• Solid SQL and Python skills
• Experience with cloud platforms — Azure preferred, but AWS or GCP experience transfers well
• Comfortable building APIs (REST) to serve data to frontend applications
• Experience handling messy, inconsistent real-world data from external sources
• Able to work independently with minimal hand-holding
• Clear communicator — you flag problems early and explain technical decisions in plain language

Nice to Have
Experience with retail, FMCG, or point-of-sale data
Familiarity with Azure Data Factory, Synapse, or Azure Functions
Experience generating automated reports (PDF/Excel) from data pipelines
Experience working in an early-stage startup where things move fast and scope shifts