Senior Data Engineer
Axial Search is a specialist executive search firm built for one kind of hire: leaders who help organizations navigate AI transformation.
What The Market Looks Like
We've tracked 1,300+ mid-level data engineering postings across Canada in the last six months, with strongest hiring concentrated in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal across IT Services, Technology, Financial Services, and Professional Services sectors. Compensation for mid-level specialists typically lands between $120,000 and $230,000, with a median of around $130,000. The strongest candidates bring hands-on experience building and maintaining data pipelines at scale, deep fluency in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and a track record of collaborating with analytics and ML teams to unblock downstream work — they ship data infrastructure that other teams depend on.
Job Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and ETL processes that move data across multiple sources and systems
- Own data quality, governance, and documentation standards to ensure downstream teams (analytics, ML, business intelligence) can trust and use the data
- Optimize database performance and data warehouse architecture to support growing query volume and analytical workloads
- Partner with data analysts, data scientists, and business stakeholders to understand requirements and translate them into robust technical solutions
- Troubleshoot production data issues, implement monitoring and alerting, and lead incident response when pipelines fail
- Lead code reviews and mentor junior engineers on data engineering best practices and tooling
- Evaluate and integrate new data tools and technologies to improve engineering velocity and system reliability
Candidate Requirements
- 5+ years of professional data engineering experience, including hands-on work building and operating production data pipelines
- Strong SQL skills and deep experience with at least one major cloud data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or equivalent)
- Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (Python, Scala, Java, or Go) used in data engineering contexts
- Demonstrated experience designing and implementing data models, managing schemas, and ensuring data consistency across systems
- Ability to communicate technical trade-offs and data architecture decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Track record of shipping infrastructure improvements that directly reduced operational toil or improved data accessibility for downstream teams