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Salary: CAD 207,000 - 253,000 / annual
Relay is a digital banking platform serving self-made business owners with financial clarity and cash flow visibility. The data engineering team has grown from 4 to 12 engineers and is now splitting into two specialized teams. You will lead the Data Platform team, which owns the foundational infrastructure, cost optimization, real-time data capabilities, observability, and AI infrastructure that enable the rest of the company.
In this role, you will lead and grow a senior team of data engineers, providing direction, challenging thinking, and helping the team make decisions and move work forward. Your key responsibilities include:
- Own Snowflake cost optimization. In your first 90 days, develop and execute a plan to reduce Snowflake costs month over month, working closely with the team to identify and deliver savings.
- Accelerate data delivery to stakeholders by defining and driving Relay's approach to real-time data and platform enablement, including streaming infrastructure (Kafka) and a Snowflake MCP server that opens data to AI tooling.
- Build observability and monitoring so the team identifies problems before stakeholders encounter them.
- Translate platform work into business outcomes by helping the team prioritize upgrades, migrations, and refactors, linking technical investments to revenue, efficiency, and risk reduction.
- Balance speed against technical debt in both directions—sometimes advocating for shipping with debt when business value justifies it, sometimes advocating for more time to reduce debt.
- Run the team's operating rhythm, including standups, sprint and roadmap planning, architectural decisions, code review, and cross-company requests.
The team's north star is platform health: a fast, reliable, cost-efficient platform with strong observability and partners across the company who can work without waiting on the data platform team.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Minimum two years of experience managing engineers, including senior team members with strong technical perspectives and expertise to back them up.
- Deep, hands-on production experience with Snowflake and dbt, including building data models.
- Proven track record owning a production data platform, ideally with meaningful improvements such as cost reduction, reliability improvements, or new capability additions.
- Ability to challenge decisions with curiosity rather than authority; ask why before asking how long.
- Lead with context: explain the problem, metric, and business case before discussing architecture.
- High fluency with AI tools, both in personal workflow and in guiding teams building AI-enabled data capabilities.
BONUS EXPERIENCE:
- AWS or GCP
- Dagster or other data orchestration tools
- Fivetran and Hightouch
- Terraform
- Kafka or other real-time data infrastructure
