Specialist Data and AI - Tooling Administrator

Being part of Air Canada is to become part of an iconic Canadian symbol, recently ranked the best Airline in North America. Let your career take flight by joining our diverse and vibrant team at the leading edge of passenger aviation.

The Specialist, Data & AI (Tooling Administrator), will provide technical leadership for the administration, governance, and operational management of Air Canada’s Databricks platform and enterprise data integration platforms including Talend. This role is accountable for platform security, reliability, performance, scalability, governance, and cost optimization, ensuring that the platforms effectively support enterprise data engineering, analytics, and AI workloads.

This position reports to the Manager, Data & AI.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Databricks, providing technical guidance, establishing platform standards and guardrails and supporting engineering teams in the adoption of platform capabilities and best practices.
• Administer Databricks account and workspace configuration, identity and access, compute policies, monitoring, security and cost optimization.
• Administer and govern Unity Catalog, including metastore configuration, catalogs, schemas, permissions, external locations, storage credentials, lineage and data access controls.
• Drive automation of platform configuration, provisioning, policies, permissions and operational processes using Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD best practices.
• Provide administration and operational support for enterprise data integration platforms, including Talend, covering access management, runtime 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/integration across enterprise platforms.
• Establish monitoring and observability for platform health, workloads, jobs, compute utilization, security events, and platform usage, proactively identifying reliability, performance, and cost issues.
• Define and implement platform security controls for identity, access, data protection, network security, auditability, and the protection of data at rest and in transit, in alignment with Enterprise Architecture and Cyber Security standards.
• Establish FinOps best practices, including tagging, cost attribution, budgets, usage dashboards, KPI reporting, capacity planning and compute right-sizing to continuously optimize platform consumption and cost.
• Provide technical enablement, knowledge sharing, and guidance to engineering teams on platform capabilities, governance, performance optimization, cost management and best practices.
• Influence and guide solution architecture and design decisions to ensure implementations align with enterprise architecture, security requirements, and platform standards.
• Stay current with Databricks, cloud platform, data engineering, integration, and AI capabilities, evaluating new technologies and recommending adoption where they provide measurable business or operational value.
• Establish and continuously improve incident response, troubleshooting, escalation, root-caus analysis, and problem management procedures for platform-related incidents.

• A relevant University degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology and/or equivalent relevant experience.
• 5+ years of experience in data, cloud, or platform engineering/administration including hands-on experience administering enterprise-scale data platforms.
• Strong hands-on experience administering and governing Databricks environments.
• Strong knowledge of Databricks account and workspace administration, Unity Catalog, identity and access management, compute configuration and policies, jobs/workflows, networking, monitoring, security and cost management.
• Knowledge and experience with data architecture, databases, data integration, ETL/ELT and data ingestion patterns, with experience working across enterprise data platforms and technologies such as Databricks, Talend, Snowflake, Collibra, Dataiku.
• Excellent communication skills both oral and written.
• Proven ability to be highly productive and efficient in a team driven environment.  
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.  
• Demonstrate punctuality and dependability to support overall team success in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience in Airline data management is an asset. 

Conditions of Employment:

Candidates must be eligible to work in the country of interest at the time any offer of employment is made and are responsible for obtaining any required work permits, visas, or other authorizations necessary for employment. Prior to their start date, candidates will also need to provide proof of their eligibility to work in the country of interest.

Linguistic Requirements

Based on equal qualifications, 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 work environment which highlights employees’ unique contributions to our company’s success.

As an equal opportunity employer, we welcome applications from all to help us build a diverse workforce which reflects the diversity of our customers, and communities, in which we live and serve.

Air Canada thanks all candidates for their interest; however only those selected to continue in the process will be contacted.