Jobs / Faire
Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer
Faire · Cambridge, ON, Canada
Cambridge, ON, Canada216,000-297,000 CAD/yearlyRemote
Remuneration
Equity and benefits
Location
Cambridge, ON, Canada
Visa sponsorship
Not specified
Job summary
This hands-on Staff Engineer role sets the direction and roadmap for moving production data into reliable, discoverable analytical stores used by engineering, data science, analytics, and business teams. The engineer builds CDC and streaming ingestion from CockroachDB and MySQL through Kafka into Iceberg tables on S3, while improving data contracts, quality monitoring, and platform reliability. The role also leads pipeline migrations and mentors engineers, working with Spark, Airflow, Fivetran, Snowflake, and Databricks.
Benefits
EquityBenefits
Qualifications
- Experience building and operating data infrastructure at meaningful scale and setting its technical direction.
- Deep experience with CDC and streaming ingestion from operational databases through Kafka.
- Hands-on experience with lakehouse architectures and open table formats; familiarity with Iceberg on S3 is especially valuable.
- Knowledge of partitioning, compaction, catalogs, and copy-on-write versus merge-on-read.
- Strong Spark skills and experience with Databricks and Snowflake on shared storage.
- Practical experience with data quality, observability, data contracts, and SLAs.
- Experience operating Airflow at scale and using managed ingestion such as Fivetran.
- Strong SQL and data modeling skills.
- Solid Python skills and proficiency in at least one of Kotlin, Java, Scala, or Go.
- Experience deploying infrastructure on AWS with Terraform.
- Working knowledge of data governance, including access control, PII, retention, deletion, lineage, and auditing.
- Track record of leading cross-team data initiatives and migrations and mentoring senior engineers.
- Ability to explain technical tradeoffs to audiences with different levels of technical experience and help teams reach decisions.
- Willingness to take ownership of systems and participate in on-call.
Responsibilities
- Set the technical direction and roadmap for data movement from production systems to analytical stores.
- Build CDC and streaming ingestion from CockroachDB and MySQL through Kafka into Iceberg tables on S3.
- Handle ordering, deduplication, late-arriving data, schema changes, and backfills.
- Implement data contracts, quality checks, dataset ownership, and SLAs.
- Operate Airflow and Fivetran and assess build-versus-buy tradeoffs.
- Own platform reliability, SLOs, on-call, incident reviews, and follow-up improvements.
- Lead migration of existing pipelines to the new platform without disrupting dependent teams.
- Collaborate with engineers, data scientists, and analysts, and mentor engineers.
Skills
AirflowAWSCockroachDBDatabricksDynamoDBGoJavaKafkaKotlinKubernetesMySQLPythonS3ScalaSnowflakeSparkTerraform
Work schedule
In-office 3 days per week: Tuesday, Thursday, and one flexible weekdayUp to 4 weeks of remote work per year
Industry
MarketplaceE-commerceTransaction-heavy businesses
Relocation
No