Associate Director, Data Platforms

OMERS•Toronto, ON

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

Choose a workplace that empowers your impact. Join a global workplace where employees thrive. One that embraces diversity of thought, expertise and experience. A place where you can personalize your employee journey to be — and deliver — your best. We are a purpose-driven, dynamic and sustainable pension plan. An industry leading global investor with teams in Toronto to London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and other major cities across North America and Europe. We embody the values of our 665,000 members, placing their best interests at the heart of everything we do. Join us to accelerate your growth & development, prioritize wellness, build connections, and support the communities where we live and work. Don’t just work anywhere — come build tomorrow together with us. Know someone at OMERS or Oxford Properties? Great! If you're referred, have them submit your name through Workday first. Then, watch for a unique link in your email to apply. Role Summary Reporting to the Director, AI Strategy and Data Platforms, as the Associate Director, Data Platforms, your primary accountability is to operationalize and evolve the enterprise data platform strategy. You will act as the technical and strategic authority across our core platforms: Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, and Databricks. Bridging the gap between high-level business needs and deep technical architecture, you will shape the long-term vision and interoperability of our data platform ecosystem, build cross-platform enablers, and partner with business units (Investments, Oxford, Pensions, and Corporate Functions) to ensure we are maximizing the value of the data platform landscape.

Requirements

7+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data architecture, or data platform strategy roles, with a proven track record of driving technical transformations.
5+ years of hands-on technical experience designing, deploying, and optimizing modern cloud data platforms, with deep expertise in Microsoft Fabric (Azure Data Factory, ADLS, Power BI) and Snowflake.
4+ years of experience leading and developing high-performing technical teams, with a demonstrated ability to scale capabilities and deliver complex initiative
Strong technical proficiency in Databricks, specifically regarding its positioning for MLflow, advanced analytics, and unified lakehouse architectures.
Deep understanding of enterprise data concepts, including data pipelines, data refineries/warehousing, cross-platform data sharing, and semantic metrics management.
Experience integrating data platforms with overarching data management and governance tooling (e.g., Collibra, Informatica) and modern workflow orchestration (e.g., Prefect).
Excellent capability to balance big-picture strategic thinking with the technical depth required to challenge and guide engineering teams.
Exceptional communication and executive stakeholder engagement skills, with a proven ability to translate complex architectural trade-offs into clear business outcomes.
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment and lead cross-functional initiatives without always relying on direct reporting lines.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience in financial services, particularly within capital markets, private markets, or pensions, is considered a strong asset.

Responsibilities

Drive the strategic alignment and technical execution of the OMERS multi-platform data ecosystem, heavily prioritizing Microsoft Fabric and Snowflake as core platforms, alongside Databricks for advanced analytics and ML workloads.
Partner with technical and business stakeholders to translate business demand into required data capabilities and ensure our data platform ecosystem is providing exceptional value to all business units.
Collaborate with the Enterprise Architecture team to define and standardize cross-platform architectural patterns, including standard ingestion and landing zones, shared semantic layers, and cross-platform data sharing via zero-copy federation.
Collaborate with enterprise transformation initiatives to ensure the data platform rollout and capabilities are fit-for-purpose.
Lead efforts to close gaps in a multi-platform environment by integrating cross-platform pipeline orchestration
Collaborate with the Value Management, Risk & Governance team and enterprise data governance, observability, and cataloging tools.
Collaborate with teams across D&T to ensure that our data platform capabilities are aligned with our AI strategy and roadmap.
Act as a deep technical subject matter expert, getting hands-on when necessary to validate architectures, troubleshoot complex integration challenges, and transition data concepts into robust production environments.
Monitor industry trends across the modern data stack to continuously refine and enhance the data platform strategy and stack.