Omnichannel retailer scaling cloud data infrastructure across Southern Africa
Woolworths operates a 34,000-person omnichannel retail business (food, fashion, beauty, homeware) across Southern Africa, built on Oracle legacy systems now being modernized toward cloud. Active migration to AWS (Redshift, Glue, Lambda, EMR, Kinesis) paired with adoption of Apache Spark, Kafka, and Airflow signals a shift from batch ETL to real-time data pipelines — a move consistent with their self-serve analytics hub and trade-report automation projects. Finance, data, and treasury process optimization dominate current hiring and project focus.
Woolworths is a publicly listed retailer headquartered in Cape Town with over 10,000 employees across Southern Africa. The business spans food, fashion, beauty, and homeware, serving mass-market and premium customer segments. Operationally, the company runs Oracle ERP and data warehouse systems alongside growing AWS cloud footprint (Redshift, Glue, Lambda, EMR), handling multi-currency operations (forex), complex supply-chain and banking reconciliation across multiple geographies. Current product and process work spans packaging development, new product workflows, ETL optimization, and automation of weekly trade and forex reporting.
Core: Oracle, Redshift, AWS (Glue, Lambda, EMR, Kinesis, DynamoDB, Athena). Data pipeline tools: Git, Jenkins, Terraform, Python, SQL. Adopting: Apache Spark, Kafka, Apache Airflow.
Scalable data architecture migration to AWS; ETL and trade-report automation; self-serve analytics hub; site tagging; and treasury/banking reconciliation process implementation across Southern Africa.
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