Data Engineer

Chelsea Avondale is the world’s most cutting-edge home insurance group. We have developed sophisticated risk modeling and insurance pricing technologies for home insurance and deploy that technology through our own insurance company.

Our team consists of some of the brightest minds in insurance, software development, finance, and operations. Our group includes our scientific research & engineering division (Skynet Software) and Canadian property & casualty insurance company (Max Insurance).

Together, our group is transforming the Canadian and global insurance landscape.

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Chelsea Avondale is looking for a Data Engineer with a gift for understanding and explaining large datasets using Python --- the primary coding language across our organization. These datasets contain millions of rows and hundreds of columns of proprietary data and offer unique opportunities for learning. Our business is going through rapid growth, and it is essential that the analysis of our data keeps up with this pace.

The primary focus of the Data Engineer will be to gather, curate, and preprocess data from various sources, ensuring data quality and integrity at all times; to explore and analyze large connected datasets using statistical techniques and machine learning algorithms with the goal of enabling users to self-serve; and to communicate findings to stakeholders through data visualizations, reports, and presentations. Our data plays a pivotal role in driving the development of our scientific models, pricing platform and broker portal. From a deep understanding of the data, the Engineer can propose technology improvements or come up with innovative solutions to solve business problems.

This position is ideal for candidates who have an extraordinary sense of responsibility and are not afraid to roll up their sleeves. You have to be comfortable taking the initiative with rich new datasets that may be ambiguous. Our IT environment is streamlined, focusing on a core set of technologies. We need someone who is comfortable working within this framework and can innovate without relying on an extensive toolkit We take pride in maintaining a fundamental stack of technologies, much of it in Python, and we are looking for someone who shares this mentality.

While our primary language is Python, we are open to exploring and integrating new tools and technologies that can enhance our data processes. This role offers the opportunity to influence our technical direction and adopt best practices in data engineering.

If you are someone who thrives in a high-performance culture and is eager for work that is both challenging and constantly evolving, this role is perfect for you. We strongly encourage and help our team members to improve and enhance their personal skill sets within our organization. On your journey with us, you will have the ability to learn and grow rapidly, taking on more responsibilities.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Be hands-on with principled data warehouse design, data visualization, and data pipeline design and development.
• Collaborate with teams from Science, Engineering, and Business to produce relevant data solutions that can be used across multiple use cases.
• Understand the business drivers and analytical use-cases and translate these to data products.
• Explore new technologies and learn new techniques to solve data problems creatively.
• Think big and drive the strategy for better data quality within Chelsea Avondale.
• Create data visualizations that allow easy consumption of the data learnings and insights.
• Lead designing and implementing scalable data ingestion systems for various ML/AI solutions, which includes ingestion of structured and unstructured data.
• Analyze complex data flows and dependencies, and design and implement data models for optimal storage and retrieval processes.
• Strong ownership and communication skills, be able to support and align efforts to meet data user needs.
• Write and maintain clean high-quality code in Python. Maintain and enhance inherited code, ensuring adherence to best coding practices.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE & SKILLS:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Mathematics or Statistics. We encourage highly motivated new grads to apply.
• 3+ years of experience in Python and Pandas is key.
• Knowledge of Hadoop, Hive, Presto, Spark, SparkSQL, Tableau are NOT required.
• Hands-on experience in principled data warehouse design, data visualization and data pipeline design and development.
• Experience with MongoDB.
• CI/CD tools and methodologies (GitLab, branches, code reviews, merge requests, etc).
• AWS experience is a plus.
• Great communication skills. You should be able to directly communicate with senior business leaders, embed yourself within business teams, and present solutions to business stakeholders.
• Experience working independently and driving projects end to end.
• Strong problem solving and analytical skills (performance analysis, defect analysis, and reporting).
• Organized and meticulous.
• Willingness to come into our Toronto office (8 minute walk from Union station) once per month.