Senior / Staff Data Engineer | AI, Data Platforms & Data Products

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior / Staff Data Engineer | AI, Data Platforms & Data Products based in Canada. We are seeking an accomplished Senior or Staff Data Engineer to help build and scale a modern data engineering function within a fast-growing technology company. This role is ideal for a hands-on engineer who has built data platforms from the ground up and wants to shape the architecture, infrastructure, and AI-powered products that drive business growth. You will work closely with technical leadership, taking ownership across the data stack, from cloud infrastructure and distributed systems to intelligent analytics and customer-facing data products. Your work will support reliable, scalable data capabilities that deliver measurable commercial and operational value. You will have significant influence over technical strategy, engineering standards, and emerging AI initiatives. This is a fully remote opportunity for candidates based in Canada who are comfortable working in a fast-paced environment where autonomy, experimentation, and end-to-end ownership are essential. Accountabilities - Design, build, and evolve modern cloud-based data infrastructure and scalable data platforms from the ground up. - Develop reliable data pipelines, distributed systems, and event-driven architectures that support business-critical applications and products. - Work across technologies such as AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, Airflow, and dbt to create robust and maintainable data solutions. - Develop AI-enabled data capabilities, including LLM-powered workflows, agentic data solutions, semantic layers, and natural-language analytics experiences. - Build self-service analytics platforms and customer-facing or embedded data products that improve product adoption, customer experience, and commercial performance. - Address complex challenges involving data streaming, governance, metadata management, and knowledge systems.

- Evaluate emerging technologies and identify opportunities to improve the data platform as the AI and data ecosystem evolves. - Own systems throughout their lifecycle, including deployment, production reliability, observability, performance monitoring, incident response, and on-call support. - Define architectural direction, establish engineering standards, and make informed technical decisions that support long-term scalability. - Collaborate with technical leadership and cross-functional teams to identify high-impact problems, prioritize solutions, and connect engineering investments to business outcomes. - Mentor other engineers, share technical expertise, and help establish and grow the data engineering function. Requirements - At least 5 years of professional engineering experience, with demonstrated achievements and technical ownership valued more highly than tenure alone. - Proven experience building data infrastructure, platforms, or data products from scratch, ideally as an early engineering hire or within a startup or scale-up environment. - Strong foundations in distributed systems, platform engineering, software engineering, or modern data engineering. - Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS or an equivalent cloud platform. - Familiarity with modern data technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, Airflow, and dbt. - Experience designing streaming or event-driven architectures and building scalable, reliable production systems. - Demonstrated ownership of production environments, including monitoring, observability, troubleshooting, incident response, and on-call responsibilities. - Experience with AI and large language models in data platforms, including AI-assisted analytics, semantic layers, AI data assistants, or natural-language interfaces, is highly desirable.