Letlhogonolo Phiri

Junior Data Engineer with a background in both Data and Software Engineering and a strong interest in building reliable, scalable data pipelines. Experienced in Python, SQL, PostgreSQL, API data ingestion, ETL/ELT workflows, and data transformation using dbt. Familiar with Apache Airflow, Docker, data validation, incremental processing, and workflow orchestration.

Passionate about applying software engineering principles to data engineering and continuously developing skills in modern data platforms and cloud technologies.

Jnr. Data Engineer (WIL) at CCI South Africa (2026-03 – Present)

• Designing, building, and maintaining automated data pipelines for the efficient processing of large datasets.
• Developing and implementing data models for organizing and structuring data to enhance accessibility and usability.
• Monitor and optimize the performance of data pipelines, queries, data systems, and ML workflows through troubleshooting and efficiency improvements.
• Prepare and preprocess data for ML including feature engineering, validation, and train/test datasets to ensure quality, consistency, and proper formatting for models.
• Collaborated with data engineers and data scientists to build an AI-assisted Intent Detection to improve customer experience.
• Designed and executed a GDELT API data extraction pipeline to ingest, transform, and analyze global media event datasets for downstream analytics.

BSc in Information Technology – Computer Science and Informatics – University of Johannesburg (2025)