Principal Data Architect

At Neo, we’re reimagining everyday financial services from the ground up and shaping the financial future for millions of people in Canada. We’re a tech company consistently pushing for the next best thing, which provides many opportunities to grow and learn personally and professionally. Ready to materialize your passion into a connected purpose? Come join a high-speed startup in a community of high-achieving dreamers and doers, set on innovating the best solutions.

About The Role:

Neo Financial has an opportunity for a Principal Data Architect to join our team in Calgary, AB. As a Principal Data Architect, you’ll play a pivotal role in planning, building, and improving Neo’s data platform alongside a team of talented colleagues. This highly visible position will be the most senior technical individual on the data side helping redefine our data strategy and architecture as we scale and grow.

Being our in-house data expert, this individual will be working with multiple product and engineering teams across the company on key strategic initiatives. The Principal Data Architect will up-level the organization in terms of best practices and will provide technical leadership as we build out our data team.

What you’ll be doing:

• Assess and understand the current state of data at Neo - from ingestion of data, to aggregation, storage, access, analytics, export, and more.
• Master the tech stack that drives data at Neo, being able to work in any area to make big improvements that move the needle, or provide mentorship to the rest of the team.
• Develop strategies for data quality, including planning detailed projects to build out automation or testing environments.
• Provide architectural recommendations and formulate the technical roadmap, helping prioritize in a way that matches our business goals.
• Translate Neo’s long-term, high-level data vision into exact action items for the technology team, while also devoting some of your time to the hardest hands-on problems.
• Provide technical and architectural oversight for systems and projects that are required to be reliable, massively scalable, highly available and maintainable.
• Perform “code reviews” to ensure that the work done by the team meets the highest standards and best practices.
• Help select and then setup infrastructure, tooling, or vendor products as needed to build out our data ecosystem.
• Define, document, and communicate our data modeling standards, conventions, and foundational best practices so that all teams can work in the same way.
• Work with our product managers to develop business requirements or assess architecture or data impacts when changes are proposed.
• Mentor team members in best practices, processes, and technologies in data platforms.

Who we are looking for:

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in Data Warehouse, ETL, Data Streaming, Data Modeling & Reporting.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in productionizing and deploying data platforms and applications, personally setting up technologies for data ingestion all the way through to BI, export, or end-of-life archival.
• Demonstrated industry leadership in the fields of Data Warehousing, Data Science, or any Big Data related technologies.
• Experience with DBT, Snowflake, Airflow, AWS and Kafka. Experience with Databricks and Apache Spark is nice to have.
• Extensive experience in understanding a variety of complex business use cases and mapping many different systems into a unified model for data in the data warehouse.
• Ability to take business needs and constraints into account; optimizing for speed, effective estimation, cost management, team scalability, etc.
• Strong understanding of database technologies (NoSQL and relational), such as MongoDB, or PostgreSQL/MySQL or similar.
• Expert when it comes to writing and optimizing even complex SQL queries.
• Able to code data-related projects using Python or JavaScript. Additional experience in other programming languages and backend stacks is preferred.
• Understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, devops and CI/CD tooling.
• Expert level understanding of data architecting principles (ie: Data Mesh).
• Experience with automated testing in the data space; ability to architect testing solutions and develop automation while mentoring and upskilling our team to drive data quality.
• Understanding all of the challenges and solutions for data at scale.

About applying with us:

At Neo, you’ll be working with industry-leading technology that changes the way we live and redefines Canada’s financial future. It’s a serious deal, and we’re building a high performance, mission-driven, and fast-paced team that strives to make a difference in every Canadian's life. We value personal growth, autonomy, leadership at all levels, and the ability to learn quickly from mistakes. We’re a team: in it together, always. Join a world class team building truly disruptive technology, right here in the Canadian prairies.