Data Engineer - Integrations, Automation & AI

Zelo is a digital-first financing platform dedicated to empowering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by addressing challenges associated with long payment cycles. By advancing funds against pending invoices, Zelo helps businesses unlock liquidity, bridge cash flow gaps, and focus on their growth. With a transparent, scalable, and technology-driven approach, Zelo offers efficient and flexible financing solutions tailored to evolving business needs.

Based in Abu Dhabi, Zelo is backed by the International Holding Company (ADX: IHC) and regulated by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of ADGM. Zelo is committed to driving sustainable SME growth in the UAE and beyond.

Role Description

This is a full-time, on-site role located in Abu Dhabi for a Data Engineer specializing in Integrations, Automation, and AI. We are hiring a Data Engineer to build and own our third-party data ingestion, automation, and intelligent workflow layer. This is a foundational role. You will replace fragile RPAs, manual processes, and unstable APIs with robust, production-grade data pipelines, internal tools, and intelligent automation systems that power credit, underwriting, and operational workflows.

You will work hands-on with messy real-world systems, buyer portals, merchant platforms, insurer systems, and external financial tools, designing reliable programmatic solutions where clean APIs often don’t exist.

This is an ownership role. Once deployed, you are responsible for reliability, monitoring, evolution, and long-term maintainability as external systems change.

What You’ll Own

Third-Party Data Ingestion and Integration

• Design and build resilient pipelines ingesting data from external portals, partner platforms, insurer systems, and financial tools
• Replace spreadsheets, manual downloads, and brittle RPA workflows with engineered services
• Integrate via APIs where available; implement scraping, file ingestion, and automation where not
• Design fallback strategies for unstable or undocumented systems

Production Reliability & Pipeline Ownership

• Build retry logic, logging, alerting, and failure recovery as first-class concerns
• Monitor data freshness, schema changes, and quality issues
• Maintain and evolve integrations as third-party platforms change
• Take end-to-end ownership of critical extraction pipelines
• Design and maintain clean, auditable SQL schemas supporting credit and operational workflows
• Translate business logic into structured, well-documented data models
• Ensure data lineage, consistency, and quality
• Manage schema evolution and downstream impacts

Automation of Core Workflows

• Product ionise notebook-based workflows into reliable scheduled systems
• Engineer automations that reduce operational risk and manual intervention
• Build agentic flows that progressively eliminate human-dependent processes

Internal Tools & APIs

• Build internal tools and APIs using Django to support operational teams
• Develop dashboards, workflow tools, and services that enable scale and visibility
• Collaborate cross-functionally to convert process gaps into engineered systems
• Utilize AI models to create intelligent automation agents that can handle complex decision-making workflows
• Apply modern AI models for document parsing, intelligent extraction, and unstructured data processing
• Implement AI-assisted data quality checks, anomaly detection, and enrichment
• Build semi-autonomous operational agents and decision-support systems

Required Qualifications

• Strong Python experience building production-grade systems
• Django framework experience (required) for building internal APIs, tools, and dashboards
• Strong SQL and relational data modelling expertise
• Experience integrating third-party platforms and unreliable APIs
• Experience replacing RPA/manual workflows with engineered pipelines
• Proven ability to design systems for operational robustness

Hands on Python and Data Stack Engineering

• API integration:
  requests, httpx
• Web scraping & automation:
  beautifulsoup4, scrapy, selenium