Data Solutions Engineer

About us:

The Enterprise Academic, Research & Collaborative Technologies (ARC) group is a partnership between the Chief Information Officer's (CIO) division and the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation (CTSI).

ARC is a central department responsible for all matters pertaining to the development, operation, maintenance and effectiveness of core teaching and learning systems, research systems, and enterprise collaborative technologies at U of T. Included within these responsibilities are the academic toolbox (the learning management system and associated applications), web hosting services (CMS), collaborative applications (i.e., MS Teams), enterprise video-mediated applications (i.e. Zoom), and generative artificial intelligence solutions (i.e. Copilot). This responsibility includes vendor relationship management with both for-profit suppliers as well as non-profit and consortium partners. ARC also serves as the main connector between the CIO's portfolio and library technology services.

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) portfolio, operating as Information Technology Services (ITS), is home to over 200 IT professionals who provide University-wide IT services and systems to enable University of Toronto (U of T) to maintain its status as Canada's leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. From direct support to enterprise-grade academic and administrative applications (student, financial, HR and research) to online learning, information security, collaboration tools and network infrastructure, our work enables U of T's steadfast commitment to being an internationally significant research university with excellent undergraduate, graduate and professional programs.

Your opportunity:

The Data Solutions Engineer reports to the Senior Manager, Academic Applications & Analytics within the Academic Research & Collaborative Technologies unit. The primary focus of this position is to serve as the technical lead for the design and implementation of enterprise-level data solutions that enable data extraction, transformation and modelling in support of a variety of academic, operations and research initiatives. This rolewill ensure that technical solutions and architectures are built reliably, are optimized for scale and meet enterprise security standards. The successful incumbent will act as an important contributor to strategies for managing the University's growing learning records store, enriching the institutional data repository and powering the development of new learning analytics dashboards.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Developing and implementing architectural framework for highly complex and confidential university-wide IT system
• Reconciling business requirements with information architecture needs for highly complex system integration
• Conducting data modelling for business system analysis
• Advising on data structure designs
• Analyzing and configuring highly complex enterprise applications and services
• Developing, testing, and modifying programming code
• Planning, implementing and operating IT systems independently
• Advising on cost, feasibility and impact of different implementation solutions

Essential Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree or acceptable combination of equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience as a Data Architect/Data Engineer with a demonstrated ability in data modelling, ETL pipelines, data integration and data architecture to design, develop and implement enterprise big data solutions
• 5+ years of experience in large scale technology architecture, operations and design-related disciplines
• 3+ years of experience with SQL and managing large data sets using relational databases (MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc.)
• 3+ years of concrete programming and scripting language experience (e.g. Python, Java) with understanding of SDLC principles
• Strong understanding and experience implementing Azure and AWS cloud computing concepts, architectures, and services. This includes but is not limited to AWS S3, AWS Lambda, AWS Glue, AWS Athena, AWS SQS, AWS Kinesis, AWS Redshift, AWS EMR, AWS ECS, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Analytics, Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics
• Knowledge and experience building CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, AWS Developer Tools and Azure DevOps to automate testing, building, and deploying infrastructure and application code using IaC practices.
• Hands on experience with big data technologies including Spark, Hadoop, Hive, HDFS, Python
• Business information requirement analysis experience with a strong understanding of project management principles
• Solid experience with data privacy and security practices, metadata management, data governance and access controls within an enterprise data management framework
• Expert level skill with SQL
• Building ETL pipelines for large-scale data extraction, transformation and partitioning
• Expert data modelling and database design skills (both dimensional and relational)
• Proficient with business intelligence and reporting/analytics tools (e.g. Tableau, PowerBi) to analyze data
• Techniques for detecting and addressing data quality issues
• Interacting with middleware (API gateways)
• Writing complex, highly-optimized SQL and Python to interact with large data sets as needed for data engineering, modeling and processing
• Excellent analytical and problem resolution skills
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills at both a technical and business level, able to build and foster positive relationships with highly dispersed and dynamic teams

Assets (Nonessential):

• AWS/Azure Certified Solutions Architect Professional certification and/or other AWS/Azure professional certifications

To be successful in this role you will be:

• Communicator
• Cooperative
• Motivated self-learner
• Procedural
• Resourceful
• Team player

Closing Date: 02/28/2025, 11:59PM ET
Employee Group: USW
Appointment Type: Budget - Continuing
Schedule: Full-Time
Pay Scale Group & Hiring Zone:
USW Pay Band 18 -- $114,486. with an annual step progression to a maximum of $146,408. Pay scale and job class assignment is subject to determination pursuant to the Job Evaluation/Pay Equity Maintenance Protocol.
Job Category: Information Technology (IT)
Recruiter: Khristen Sivaramalingam

Lived Experience Statement
Candidates who are members of Indigenous, Black, racialized and 2SLGBTQ+ communities, persons with disabilities, and other equity deserving groups are encouraged to apply, and their lived experience shall be taken into consideration as applicable to the posted position.