Data Scientist (Waterloo)

Putting people first, every day BDO is a firm built on a foundation of positive relationships with our people and our clients.

Each day, our professionals provide exceptional service, helping clients with advice and insight they can trust.

In turn, we offer an award-winning environment that fosters a high priority on your personal and professional growth.

Your Opportunity

We are seeking a talented Data Scientist with a strong specialization in Data Analytics & Visualization to join our Innovation and Change team. This is a replacement role and is pivotal in transforming raw data into actionable insights that enhance operational efficiency, support audit, tax, and advisory engagements, and enable data-driven decision-making across the firm. As a member of the Data Analytics team, you will not just analyze data; you will be responsible for the "last mile" of our data strategy: translating complex internal data into sophisticated, interactive dashboards and data products for business users across the organization.

You will work directly within our Databricks lakehouse and SQL data warehouses to architect data models, curated datasets, and predictive tools that enable firmwide insight generation.

Key Responsibilities

• Dashboard Development: Design, build, and maintain advanced Power BI dashboards that track firm KPIs, workforce utilization, financial performance, and internal quality metrics. Design user-friendly visualizations that present complex data in ways that are accessible to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Data Modeling & Transformation: Write complex SQL queries and utilize Databricks to clean, aggregate, and structure raw data for visualization and data product layers. Responsible for the ETL processes required to collect and transform large datasets for reporting, analytics, and predictive modeling use cases.
• Data Product Development & Maintenance: Design, build, and maintain curated data products—standardized, reusable, business-ready datasets that serve as trusted sources of truth. Collaborate with business stakeholders to evolve data products based on emerging operational or analytical needs.
• Predictive Analytics & Modeling: Develop, test, and deploy predictive models to support firmwide decision-making and identify opportunities for optimization. Monitor and maintain model accuracy and effectiveness over time, ensuring ongoing performance alignment with business needs.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Partner with internal Finance, HR, Market Intelligence, and Business teams to gather requirements and translate non-technical business questions into visual data stories.
• Communication & Storytelling: Clearly communicate technical analysis and results to stakeholders using data visualizations, reports, and presentations, ensuring insights are actionable.
• Automation: Automate data refresh schedules and reporting workflows to replace manual Excel-based processes. Ensure end-to-end reliability, monitoring, and sustainability of automated pipelines.
• Governance: Ensure all internal data handling complies with our firm's strict security, privacy, and compliance standards. Maintain documentation for data models, data products, predictive models, and analytical processes.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelors degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.
• SQL Mastery: Advanced proficiency in SQL (window functions, CTEs, stored procedures) with a demonstrated ability to write complex queries, optimize performance, and work with relational databases.
• Databricks: Hands‑on experience with Databricks for data engineering, modeling, and analysis.
• Power BI: Expert-level skills in Power BI, including DAX, Power Query (M), and managing workspaces/gateways.
• Communication: Solid ability to explain technical data insights to non-technical accounting and finance professionals.
• Preferred Qualifications: Experience working within a Professional Services, Financial Services, or CPA firm environment is an asset.
• Knowledge of Python: Familiarity with Python for statistical analysis or scripting outside of Databricks.
• Azure Cloud Services: Familiarity with Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake.
• Predictive Modeling: Experience with predictive modeling or machine learning concepts.

The expected range of compensation for this role is $74,000 to $112,000.