SickKids Foundation, with over 50 years of philanthropic impact is Canada's largest charitable funder of child health research, learning and care, raising over $200 million last year. As a national charity, SickKids Foundation invests in national and international initiatives to benefit children in Canada and around the world. As the fundraising partner to The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), we are aligned in supporting Precision Child Health (PCH), the future of tailoring medicine to each child's unique traits so SickKids can diagnose faster, treat smarter, and predict better.

We are driven by our core values of integrity, collaboration, excellence, innovation, and inclusion, with goals of delivering a superior donor experience, investing in our people and culture, driving innovative and sustainable fundraising, and disrupting the market through data and technology.

SickKids Foundation is committed to an inclusive culture by embedding equity, diversity and inclusion in our policies, practices, and behaviours. We aim to build awareness and skills in this area, both internally and with our partners. Our commitment extends to creating a safe, positive work environment. For details on our Equity, Diversity & Inclusion commitment, please click here.

We’re committed to attracting and retaining passionate individuals to help create a healthier future. That’s why SickKids Foundation is looking for a recent Associate Director, Data Engineer.

Description of the Position

Reporting to the Director, Data Science & Engineering, the Associate Director, Data Engineer designs, builds, and operates enterprise-grade data platforms that deliver trusted, well-governed data across SickKids Foundation.



The role will help establish and evolve a production-grade cloud platform using medallion architecture principles, with a focus on reliability, data quality, cost efficiency, and scalable delivery.

As a senior hands-on technical contributor, you will set engineering standards, support platform incident response, enable self-serve analytics and AI-powered data products, and provide specialized technical guidance to data and analytics partners across the Foundation.

You will

- Design, build, and operate enterprise-grade data engineering platforms using modern cloud technologies such as Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, and Databricks, aligned to bronze, silver, and gold medallion architecture principles.
- Build and maintain robust, idempotent ETL/ELT pipelines with embedded validation, data quality checks, clear lineage, and repeatable delivery workflows.
- Design data models and semantic layers that make trusted data accessible for analytics, reporting, and self-serve business intelligence.
- Establish platform observability through query profiling, cost attribution, utilization metrics, alerting, and SLO/SLA monitoring; lead day-to-day response to data availability and performance incidents.
- Define and enforce coding standards, CI/CD patterns, and Infrastructure-as-Code practices to support consistent, secure,



and scalable platform deployment.
- Partner with business stakeholders, Data & Analytics, IT/Infrastructure, and Security teams to translate requirements into reliable platform capabilities and support appropriate access, governance, and compliance.
- Enable AI and advanced analytics use cases, including natural-language querying and AI-powered data products, by partnering with stakeholders to identify and deliver high-value opportunities.
- Stay current with developments in cloud data platforms, AI, and emerging engineering practices, bringing relevant advancements into the platform roadmap and providing technical guidance to analysts, BI developers, and engineering partners.

Qualifications

While we know that for any job posting no one candidate will possess the qualifications being sought in equal measure, below is an outline of the qualifications we believe are important for a candidate to bring to the position or for the successful candidate to develop while in the role:

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5-7 years of hands-on data engineering or platform engineering experience, ideally spanning the full lifecycle of architecting, building, and operating production data platforms.
- Deep technical expertise with modern cloud data platforms such as Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, or Databricks and strong knowledge of medallion/lakehouse architecture.
- Strong data modelling and database design skills for analytics and business consumption, including dimensional modelling and sem

📌 Associate Director, Data Engineer (Toronto)
🏢 SickKids Foundation
📍 Toronto