Senior Snowflake Data Engineer

Location: Toronto (Hybrid – 200 Bay Street)
Engagement: One-year contract with potential for conversion to full-time
Openings: 1

Overview

We are seeking a Senior Snowflake Data Engineer to lead the design, development, and operation of enterprise-scale data platforms built on Snowflake. This role requires deep hands-on expertise with Snowflake-native features, modern ELT pipelines, cloud data architecture, and production-grade data engineering practices. You will play a key role in shaping platform standards, mentoring engineers, and evolving the Snowflake ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and implementation of Snowflake-based data architectures, including schemas, data vault/house/star models, materialized views, and zero-copy cloning strategies.
Build, maintain, and optimize production ETL/ELT pipelines using Snowflake-native tools such as Snowpipe, Snowpark, Streams & Tasks, along with partner tools (e.g., dbt, Fivetran, Matillion, Airbyte, Streamsets).
Develop Snowflake-native utilities and applications using Snowpark for Python, UDFs, external functions, and internal tooling to accelerate development and data delivery.
Optimize query performance and cost through warehouse sizing, clustering keys, partitioning strategies, workload isolation, and resource monitoring.
Implement data governance, security, and access controls, including role-based access control, masking policies, object tagging, audit logging, and data lineage.
Automate infrastructure and deployments using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing for SQL and Snowpark workloads.
Build operational observability tooling, including monitoring, alerting, usage and cost reporting, and incident response playbooks.
Mentor engineers, review technical designs, and contribute to roadmap decisions for Snowflake platform evolution.

Required Skills and Experience

Strong hands-on experience designing, deploying, and operating Snowflake in production environments.
Deep expertise with Snowflake features including Snowpark, Streams & Tasks, Snowpipe, Time Travel, cloning, materialized views, external functions, and UDFs.
Proven ETL/ELT development experience using SQL, dbt, and one or more ingestion tools (e.g., Fivetran, Matillion, Airbyte, Streamsets, Kafka connectors).
Strong proficiency in Python (Snowpark and connectors), SQL tuning, and performance optimization.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code and automation tools such as Terraform, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or equivalent.
Solid knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and their integration with Snowflake.
Strong understanding of modern data architecture patterns, including medallion architecture, data modeling, governance, and secure data sharing.
Demonstrated experience implementing CI/CD, automated testing, and production operational best practices for data workloads.

Preferred Qualifications

Snowflake SnowPro Core or advanced Snowflake certifications.
Experience with dbt (Core or Cloud) for modular, scalable SQL transformations.
Exposure to data catalogs, data lineage tools, or data virtualization technologies.
Familiarity with BI and analytics integrations such as Looker, Tableau, or Power BI, including Snowflake-optimized semantic layers.
Experience building internal developer tools or lightweight data applications using Snowpark or web frameworks.