Junior Data Engineer - Contract (6 Months)
📍 Markham, ON | Hybrid (4 Days/Week in Office) | New Grad Welcome
We're looking for a motivated recent graduate to join our client's team on an initial 6-month contract as a Junior Data Engineer. Working in a hybrid model (4 days per week in office) out of Markham, ON, you'll be embedded with an experienced data engineering team, building and supporting data pipelines and solutions within a Microsoft Azure cloud environment. Strong performance may lead to contract extension or a full-time opportunity.
What You'll Do
- Design, develop, and maintain data pipelines and ETL/ELT workflows using Azure-native tools such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, and Azure Synapse Analytics
- Support the ingestion, transformation, and storage of structured and unstructured data across Azure Data Lake and other cloud storage solutions
- Write and optimize SQL queries to support data validation, reporting, and analytics use cases
- Collaborate with data analysts, data architects, and business stakeholders to understand data requirements and translate them into scalable solutions
- Monitor and troubleshoot pipeline failures, data quality issues, and performance bottlenecks
- Contribute to data documentation, data dictionaries, and lineage tracking to support governance standards
- Participate in code reviews and contribute to best practices around data engineering and cloud infrastructure
What We're Looking For
- Recent graduate - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, or a related field
- Academic, internship, or co-op experience working with data engineering concepts - ETL pipelines, data warehousing, or cloud data platforms
- Hands-on exposure to Microsoft Azure services - Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse, Azure Data Lake, or similar
- Strong SQL skills - comfortable writing complex queries, joins, aggregations, and transformations
- Familiarity with Python for data processing and scripting
- Able to commute to Markham, ON for hybrid work arrangement
Nice to Have
- Experience with Apache Spark or PySpark for large-scale data processing
- Exposure to Azure DevOps or CI/CD pipelines for data workflows
- Knowledge of data modelling concepts - star schema, data vault, or dimensional modelling
- Familiarity with Power BI or other visualization tools
- Microsoft Azure certifications (e.g., Azure Data Engineer Associate DP-203) or currently pursuing
