Tech Lead, Data (Remote First)

Zensurance is a scale-up InsurTech company that is re-imagining the commercial insurance market. At Zensurance, we want to empower small businesses across Canada to thrive by offering an honest, simplified, and modern approach to insurance. Our main recipe is a combination of modern technology and insurance industry expertise powered by our talented team members. 

Being a technology-forward company, we utilize various tools and platforms to create fun, engaging and meaningful work experiences for our employees, as a remote-first company.

We are boldly going where no insurance broker has gone before!

The role:

We are looking for a Tech Lead, Data to join our Data Team! This is a mid-level Subject-Matter-Expert position that leverages a significant technical background to guide the Data Team’s technical strategy in accordance with the department’s culture of iterative, autonomous development and deployment. With a keen focus on security and scalability concerns, you will work closely with our Product Managers, Data Team Lead, and Staff Developers to design and implement the systems and processes that enable Zensurance to effectively harness our data in growing the business.

As an individual contributor and a subject-matter-expert, you will coach and mentor peers or professional-level developers, and assist the Engineering Leadership Team with employee training and development to continuously enhance the team's technical capabilities and delivery excellence.

This is a remote-first role within the GTA. #LI-Remote

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with project stakeholders and the Data team to design, build and implement scalable, user-friendly data products using Snowflake, dbt, and Looker.
• Lead the Data team in planning for and accommodating large migrations in upstream sources systems.
• Collaborate with Product Management to examine, adjust and break down roadmap items into epics, and break down epics into discreet, actionable, appropriately sized tickets in the team’s backlog.
• Oversee the planning and deployment of advanced data products (machine learning models, LLM powered applications)
• Provide a technical perspective on organizational objectives within the team’s scope of activities. Analyze requirements, identify areas of concern, and provide recommendations based on extensive technical background.
• Using POC models, design and implement systems and infrastructure in accordance with the team’s vision and culture.
• Adhere to the organization's security strategy using a security-first mindset
• Discuss various strategies and architecture, and highlight trade-offs for potential solutions.
• Perform code reviews, ensure pull requests accurately reflect the acceptance criteria of the tickets they address.
• Use quality metrics to identify gaps in testing strategy. Work with teams to recommend solutions that are in accordance with accepted testing frameworks.
• Define and prioritize areas of technical debt and bugs, take into consideration outcomes of the incident management process, and address them with the team.
• Foster a culture of iterative deployability with awareness of cycle time and failure rates.
• Coach and mentor the Data team, work to expand their technical knowledge and skills.
• Use a systematic approach to debugging to diagnose issues within the application.
• Write unit tests as well as higher-level tests to ensure application quality and stability.
• Consistently produce production-ready code that is easily testable, easily understandable, and accounts for edge cases and errors, using comments and other documentation strategies where appropriate.
• Follow Agile practices, suggest improvements, and participate in team events.
• Develop a strong understanding of the company’s goals and initiatives, help the engineering team deliver on those goals/initiatives.
• Ensure technical standards like accessibility, performance, security, maintainability, functional correctness, operability and observability are observed in the modules developed and maintained by the team.
• Document decisions, research and guides to foster and build a culture of continuous learning and continuous improvement.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Requirements:

• University degree or college diploma in a recognized technical, vocational or academic program (preferably in Engineering or Computer Science) or equivalent work experience.
• 7+ years building and supporting user facing data applications.
• 5+ building and maintaining data pipelines and ETL systems with Python.
• 5+ years data modelling with SQL. 
• 3+ years developing and deploying machine learning models.
• 3+ years orchestration experience with Kubernetes, Airflow.
• 2+ years designing scalable and distributed systems.
• 2+ years using Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform.
• 2+ years experience and experimentation with LLMs (prompt engineering, fine tuning).
• 2+ Years of experience coaching and mentoring data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists.
• Experience implementing secure data practices to adhere to compliance standards.
• Extensive experience with the Scrum framework and Agile methodologies.
• Familiarity with goal setting frameworks such as OKRs.
• Experience with MongoDB, dbt, Snowflake, Segment, and Looker.

About our Engineering Team:

Our fully remote engineering team fosters a learning culture that encourages professional development. Some of the highlights of the team environment include: 

• Approachable, a supportive leadership team with extensive technical experience and ability.

• Training and professional development budgets.

• Knowledge sharing through power-ups.

• Learning events and book clubs that help the team develop their skills and create a safe, supportive environment.

• Twice-annual hackathons that provide opportunities to explore interests and practice new technical skills.

• Opportunities to share your knowledge and experience and mentor others.

In addition, we provide amazing opportunities for career advancement. We provide well-defined and documented career progression paths to our engineering team members that provide clear expectations and requirements for advancement in our fast-growing environment. 

As we scale our team, you'll have the opportunity to work on challenging projects using a modern tech stack and cutting-edge systems, including microservices and micro-frontends, with industry-leading tools such as NodeJS, React, TypeScript, Kafka, and more.

Perks we offer at Zensurance:

• Opportunity to work for Canada’s fastest-growing #insurtech scale-up 

• Primarily remote work environment available to everyone

• Laptop, extra monitor and main accessories are provided 

• Extra home office and supplies allowance to help with work-from-home set up

• Comprehensive and flexible health and dental plans to suit all lifestyles, including mental health 

• Health/Personal Spending Accounts to subsidize your healthy habits and purchases

• Parental Leave Top Up

• Weekly Friday companywide huddles for casual catch-ups with other departments

• Build next-level relationships with your peers through scheduled companywide virtual and in-person team-building events

• Be a part of something special. We are confident you won’t find any other insurance company like us :)

Who we are. What we're building.

Business is hard work, insurance doesn’t have to be!

At Zensurance we believe that teamwork makes the dream work.

We are passionate about providing business owners with the best insurance solutions at great rates through an online and easy-to-use platform.

Our secret sauce is all about our culture. Here at Zensurance our culture is built on four core values that we live and breathe daily. They are:

INTEGRITY: We do what's right.

INCLUDE: We are an open and safe space for all.

INVENT: We take an innovative approach to creating straightforward solutions for our customers.

DELIVER: We set ambitious goals and hold ourselves accountable for achieving them.

Zensurance celebrates diversity in its workforce structure and encourages applications from all backgrounds.

Zensurance is an inclusive employer that celebrates diversity in its workforce structure. We encourage applications from all qualified candidates and will accommodate applicants’ needs under the respective provincial human rights codes throughout all stages of the recruitment and selection process. Please advise the recruiter if you require accommodation; to ensure your accessibility needs are accommodated throughout this process. Information received relating to accommodation will be addressed confidentially.

We understand that looking for a new exciting opportunity can be time-consuming. We truly appreciate your time in going through the job posting and applying for a position with us.