Specialist - Data and Artificial Intelligence - Administrator - Tooling

Joining Air Canada is about joining a Canadian icon, Air Canada recently named Best Airline in North America. Take your career to new heights by joining our innovative and diverse team at the forefront of passenger air transport.

The Data and Artificial Intelligence Specialist (Tooling Administrator) will provide technical leadership for the administration, governance, and operations management of Air Canada's Databricks platform and enterprise data integration platforms, including Talend. The person in this position is responsible for security, reliability, performance, scalability, governance, and cost optimization of the platforms, ensuring that the platforms effectively support the enterprise's data engineering, analytics, and AI workloads.

She will report to the Manager - Data and Artificial Intelligence.

Responsibilities:

• Act as a subject matter expert for Databricks by providing technical guidance, establishing standards and constraints for the platforms, and supporting Engineering teams in adopting platform capabilities and best practices.
• Administer Databricks account and workspace configuration, identity and access, compute policies, monitoring, security, and cost optimization.
• Administer and manage Unity Catalog, including configuration, catalogs, schemas, permissions, external locations, storage credentials, lineage, and metadata store data access controls.
• Ensure automation of platform configuration, provisioning, policies, permissions, and operational processes using infrastructure as code and best practices in integration and delivery pipelines.
• Ensure administration and operational support of enterprise data integration platforms, including Talend, covering access management, execution environments, deployments, monitoring, upgrades, troubleshooting, and platform lifecycle management.
• Provide technical guidance and establish reusable patterns and frameworks for scalable, reliable, and efficient data ingestion and integration across enterprise platforms.
• Implement monitoring and observability of platform health and utilization, workloads, tasks, compute usage, and security events, proactively identifying reliability, performance, and cost issues.
• Define and implement platform security controls for identity and access management, data protection, network security, auditability, and data protection at rest and in transit, in accordance with enterprise architecture and cybersecurity standards.
• Implement financial operations best practices, including tagging, cost attribution, budgets, utilization dashboards, reporting of key performance indicators, capacity planning, and compute sizing to continuously optimize platform consumption and costs.
• Provide technical assistance, knowledge sharing, and guidance to Engineering teams on platform capabilities, governance, performance optimization, cost management, and best practices.
• Influence and guide architecture and solution design decisions to ensure implementations comply with enterprise architecture, security requirements, and platform standards.
• Keep abreast of Databricks, cloud platform, data engineering, integration, and AI capabilities, evaluating new technologies and recommending their adoption when they offer measurable business or operational value.
• Establish and continuously improve incident response, troubleshooting, escalation, root cause analysis, and problem management procedures for platform-related incidents.

Qualifications

• Relevant university degree in computer science, engineering, or information technology, or equivalent relevant experience.
• At least five years of experience in data, cloud, or platform engineering and administration, including hands-on experience administering enterprise-scale data platforms.
• Solid hands-on experience administering and governing Databricks environments.
• In-depth knowledge of Databricks account and workspace administration, Unity Catalog, identity and access management, compute configuration and policies, jobs and workflows, networking, monitoring, security, and cost management.
• Knowledge and experience in data architecture, databases, data integration, ETL/ELT frameworks, and data ingestion patterns, and experience working with enterprise data platforms and technologies, including Databricks, Talend, Snowflake, Collibra, and Dataiku.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.
• Proven ability to be highly productive and effective in a team environment.
• Strong talent for analysis and problem solving.
• Demonstrated punctuality and reliability to promote the overall success of the team in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience in data management for air transport, an asset.

Employment conditions:

Candidates must be eligible to work in the country concerned at the time an offer of employment is presented and are responsible for obtaining the necessary work permits, visas, or other authorizations. Proof of eligibility must be provided before the start date.

Language Requirements

Equal skills being equal, preference will be given to bilingual candidates.

Diversity and inclusion

Air Canada is strongly committed to diversity and inclusion and aims to create a healthy, accessible, and rewarding workplace that highlights the unique contribution of our employees to the success of our business.

As an equal opportunity employer, we encourage applications from a diverse range of candidates so that we can build a workforce that is varied and representative of our customers and the communities where we live and serve.

Air Canada thanks all candidates for their interest, but only those selected for an interview will be contacted.