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About Zeno

An unprecedented energy transition has begun. To meet 2040 net zero goals, over 2 billion electric two-wheelers (motorcycles) must be sold and $11 trillion in fuel consumption replaced. Zeno is building a tech platform to electrify this two-wheeler market, currently responsible for more than 4% of the world’s GHG emissions. Our mission is to accelerate the energy transition and democratize the benefits across Africa, India, and Latin America. With a focus on East Africa as a starting point, Zeno is building a new energy ecosystem with ground-up development of a fundamentally better electric motorcycle and associated battery swap network to drive a better experience for our customers.

We are looking for audacious, creative, and committed people to join us on this important mission. You will be joining a bold team consisting of leading engineers, operators, and entrepreneurs hailing from companies that include Tesla, Apple, Google, SRAM, Ola Electric, Dott, LiveWire, Lucid, Bolt, Microsoft, SafeBoda, Sun Mobility, among many others. Zeno has just closed its seed round with Lowercarbon, Silicon Valley’s leading climate tech venture fund, Toyota Ventures, the VC of the world’s largest automotive company, and 4DX Ventures, a leading early-stage investor in Africa.


The Role

Zeno is seeking a highly skilled and hands-on Data Engineer to design, build, and scale our global data ecosystem. Sitting within our core Global Insights Node, this role is not a traditional corporate dashboard-building job. You will bridge the gap between heavy hardware telematics and high-fidelity operational intelligence.

You will design and build a resilient, local-first data architecture capable of handling high-frequency telemetry from moving vehicles and distributed battery swap stations operating in environments with variable network connectivity.

The ideal candidate combines strong systems engineering fundamentals with an analytical mindset, a passion for first-principles problem solving, and a refusal to rely on bloated enterprise templates when a leaner, more elegant solution exists.


What You’ll Do

1. Data Architecture & Edge Ecosystem Design

  • Design, build, and maintain a highly resilient, scalable data architecture capable of syncing, storing, and processing massive datasets from both centralized cloud services and distributed edge devices (battery swap stations and vehicles).
  • Establish robust strategies for partition tolerance and local-first data caching to handle intermittent cellular connectivity in emerging markets.

2. High-Performance Pipeline Development

  • Develop, test, and optimize batch and stream-processing pipelines to handle real-time IoT telematics, state-of-charge tracking, and transactional business data.
  • Build efficient ingestion mechanisms from internal systems, IoT hardware modules, APIs, and third-party operational platforms using languages like Go, Rust, or Python.

3. First-Principles Infrastructure Optimization

  • Constantly challenge the data-stack status quo. Focus on building lightweight, cost-effective, and highly performant data systems, selecting tools based on architectural suitability rather than industry hype.
  • Optimize data storage layouts, partitioning schemes, and query mechanics to handle high data volumes with minimal latency and infrastructure cost.

4. Unified Semantics & Intelligence Enablement

  • Architect clean, well-documented semantic layers and structured transformations (using SQL and modern modeling frameworks) to expose reliable datasets.
  • Support both traditional analytical queries (BI dashboards in Grafana, Looker, or Kibana) and downstream machine learning and automated agentic pipelines.

5. Data Quality, Reliability & Observability

  • Implement strict data validation, monitoring, and proactive alerting frameworks to ensure absolute consistency and accuracy across the network.
  • Define and maintain strict access control, governance, and data privacy standard practices across the global insights platform.

6. Engineering Hygiene & DevOps

  • Packaged and deploy data services using Docker and Kubernetes.
  • Maintain elegant CI/CD automation pipelines for data code deployments and infrastructure-as-code updates.
  • Ensure impeccable Git/version control hygiene (clean commit histories, thorough documentation, and rigorous peer code reviews).


What You Bring

  • The Mindset: A true first-principles thinker. You are energized by physical constraints (like network drops or limited hardware memory) and prefer elegant, custom-tailored solutions over bloated, off-the-shelf enterprise software.
  • Core Technical Expertise: Strong programming fundamentals in systems-adjacent or highly performant languages (Go, Rust, or Python) alongside advanced mastery of SQL.
  • IoT & Telematics Experience: Proven experience dealing with high-volume, time-series, or streaming telematics/IoT data.
  • Distributed Systems Knowledge: Hands-on experience with modern streaming and orchestration tools (such as Kafka, Redpanda, Airflow, Spark, or Beam) and an understanding of how to run them efficiently.
  • Modern Warehouse Proficiency: Practical experience leveraging cloud-native data warehouses or lakehouses (such as BigQuery, Snowflake, ClickHouse, or Redshift) for high-performance analytics.
  • Cloud & DevOps Foundations: Solid working knowledge of cloud ecosystems (AWS and/or GCP) and experience deploying robust services via Docker and Kubernetes.
  • Data Advocacy: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to articulate complex data schemas, structural bottlenecks, and analytical tradeoffs to both hardware engineers and business operations teams.


Benefits

  • Competitive Salary: Highly competitive base salary based on your experience and technical capabilities.
  • Comprehensive Health Coverage: Company-sponsored healthcare plan for you and your dependents.
  • Incredible Mission & Culture: Join a world-class, globally distributed team of engineers, operators, and builders who are driving the inevitable, multi-trillion-dollar transition of two-wheelers to electric.