Overview

Join Avison Young's Data Architecture team as a Senior Analytics Engineer, where you will own and scale our analytics layer in Snowflake using dbt. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on building high-quality, business-aligned data models that power reporting, analytics, and data products across the organization.

You will act as a player-coach, balancing hands-on development with leadership of other engineers, while partnering closely with business stakeholders to define metrics, data models, and semantic consistency across the company. Your work will directly enable better decision-making by ensuring data is not just available, but trusted, well-structured, and meaningful.

This role focuses on analytics engineering and data modeling, not traditional pipeline-heavy data engineering. We are looking for someone who understands the why behind the data, not just the how.

What we value in this role:

Customer-focused: You prioritize building data products and models that are intuitive, trusted, and drive real business outcomes.

Attention to detail: You ensure data accuracy, consistency, and quality across complex transformations and models.

Diverse thoughts: You collaborate effectively, incorporate feedback, and value multiple perspectives in shaping data solutions.

Team player & leader: You lead by example-mentoring others, setting standards, and contributing hands-on alongside your team.

Pragmatic: You balance speed and quality, making smart trade-offs without compromising long-term maintainability.

Data product mindset: You treat datasets as products, with clear ownership, definitions, and accountability.

Global teammate: Comfortable working in a collaborative, distributed team environment.

Responsibilities

Analytics Engineering & Data Modeling (Core Focus):

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable, business-aligned data models in Snowflake using dbt (staging, intermediate, marts layers)
• Define and enforce semantic consistency, including metrics, dimensions, and KPIs across the organization
• Build and manage dbt projects, including models, tests, documentation, and lineage
• Design, deploy, and maintain Snowflake Cortex Search and semantic models to provide high-quality, governed data structures for LLM-powered applications and AI initiatives
• Oversee development operations and deployments of the data platform
• Translate business requirements into well-structured, reusable data models
• Implement data quality testing, validation, and documentation to ensure trusted data
• Optimize query performance and transformation efficiency in Snowflake
• Establish and enforce data modeling standards, best practices, and design patterns
• Develop reusable analytics components to accelerate data product development

Data Product & Stakeholder Engagement:

• Partner with business stakeholders to define metrics, KPIs, and data definitions
• Ensure alignment between business needs and technical implementations
• Contribute to the development of data products and semantic layers that support analytics and reporting
• Drive adoption and usability of data models across analytics and business teams

Leadership & Team Responsibilities (Player-Coach):

• Lead and mentor a small team of analytics/data engineers
• Set standards for dbt development, code reviews, testing, and documentation
• Contribute hands-on to development (~60-70%) while guiding team delivery
• Drive team productivity, technical direction, and project execution
• Support Agile processes, including backlog prioritization and sprint planning

Coordination & Delivery:

• Gather and refine business requirements for data initiatives
• Translate business needs into clear technical requirements and user stories
• Support deployment, environment management, and release processes
• Ensure high-quality delivery through testing, validation, and stakeholder alignment

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in analytics engineering, data engineering, or related roles
• Strong expertise in SQL and data warehousing concepts
• Proven experience with dbt and Snowflake (required)
• Strong experience in dimensional data modeling (star schema, marts, semantic layers)
• Experience building and maintaining analytics-ready data models and transformations
• Demonstrated ability to lead projects or mentor team members in a player-coach capacity
• Experience with data quality, testing frameworks, and documentation practices
• Familiarity with Airflow / Astronomer or similar orchestration tools
• Experience working with data pipelines, ETL/ELT processes, and cloud data platforms
• Strong analytical thinking and ability to connect data solutions to business outcomes
• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Business, or a related field, or equivalent experience

Nice to have:

• Experience in commercial real estate, geospatial data, or location-based analytics
• Experience building data products or semantic layers for BI tools

Workplace Type

On-Site