Senior Data Engineer
Government of Alberta – Technology and Innovation
Location: Edmonton, Alberta / Remote within Canada
Work Arrangement: Primarily Remote | On-site as Required
Position: 1
Contract Term: Approximately 1 year, with potential extension of up to 24 months
About the Opportunity
The Government of Alberta (GoA) is seeking an experienced Senior Data Engineer to join its Digital Design and Delivery (DDD) team within Technology and Innovation.
The Digital Design and Delivery Division is helping transform government services by enabling simpler, more efficient, accessible, and citizen-focused digital experiences. The team applies modern digital delivery practices, including human-centred design, agile methodologies, cloud technologies, modern data practices, and evidence-based decision-making.
The successful candidate will work across multiple government projects involving data engineering, data integration, analytics, cloud transformation, data architecture, and digital service modernization.
This is an excellent opportunity for a senior data professional who enjoys working in complex enterprise environments and collaborating with product owners, analysts, developers, architects, and business stakeholders.
Project Overview – JIMS 3.0
One of the key initiatives associated with this opportunity is JIMS 3.0 (Justice Information Management System).
JIMS 3.0 is a data integration initiative designed to consolidate, redesign, and modernize multiple court-data reporting environments into an integrated Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and supporting data marts and views.
The project will replace six existing standalone IBM Cognos BI data marts, including:
- Justice Information Management System (JIMS)
- Crown File Ownership (CFO)
- Court Case Management (CCM)
- Courtroom Utilization
- Courtroom Activity
- Case Adjournment
The initiative will integrate data currently extracted and transformed from the Justice Online Information Network (JOIN) database and establish a more efficient, scalable, governed, and user-friendly reporting architecture.
Key project outcomes include:
- Integrated and scalable data architecture
- Improved reporting and analytics capabilities
- Reduced reporting latency
- Preservation of historical data
- Improved data governance and data quality
- Enhanced self-service reporting capabilities
Role Overview
The Senior Data Engineer will be responsible for designing, developing, testing, and supporting enterprise data solutions across cloud and on-premises environments.
The successful candidate will work with data architects, analysts, developers, product owners, and business stakeholders to develop reliable data pipelines, dimensional models, reporting solutions, and data integration processes.
The role will involve both hands-on technical delivery and collaboration with business and technical stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
Data Engineering & Integration
- Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines across on-premises and cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure, AWS, and GCP.
- Develop end-to-end ETL/ELT pipelines to ingest, transform, validate, and store large and complex datasets.
- Build and maintain data integration solutions using SSIS and Azure Data Factory (ADF).
- Integrate data from relational databases, NoSQL platforms, APIs, files, and other heterogeneous data sources.
- Implement data validation, error handling, logging, monitoring, and reconciliation processes to ensure reliable data delivery.
- Identify and resolve pipeline performance issues, bottlenecks, and data-quality challenges.
- Optimize ETL/ELT processes for scalability, performance, maintainability, and operational reliability.
Data Modelling & Architecture
- Design and optimize dimensional data models, including Star and Snowflake schemas.
- Develop and maintain fact and dimension tables to support enterprise reporting and analytics.
- Apply data architecture principles, standards, and best practices.
- Conduct detailed data profiling and analyze source-system structures and relationships.
- Develop data mapping and transformation specifications.
- Promote reusable, scalable, and governed data models.
- Support data warehouse and data lake architecture and implementation.
- Ensure data solutions align with enterprise data governance and security requirements.
Data Migration
- Design and execute data migration solutions across on-premises and cloud environments.
- Support modernization and migration of legacy data platforms.
- Perform source-to-target analysis, data mapping, transformation validation, and reconciliation.
- Ensure data integrity, completeness, historical preservation, and quality throughout migration activities.
Business Intelligence & Analytics
- Develop Power BI dashboards and reports to support testing, analysis, operational reporting, and decision-making.
- Use DAX to develop calculated columns, measures, KPIs, and analytical models.
- Analyze datasets to identify trends, patterns, anomalies, and opportunities.
- Apply statistical analysis, Python and R where appropriate to generate actionable insights.
- Support predictive and descriptive analytics and machine-learning initiatives where required.
- Prepare curated datasets, data marts, and analytical models to enable self-service reporting.
- Communicate technical findings and data-driven recommendations to non-technical stakeholders.
DevOps & Delivery
- Use Git and collaborative development workflows to manage source code and data engineering assets.
- Develop and support CI/CD pipelines for automated testing, deployment, and monitoring.
- Support containerized development and deployment environments where applicable.
- Implement automated quality checks and deployment processes to improve reliability and release efficiency.
- Work within Agile delivery teams, contributing to backlog refinement, sprint planning, development, testing, and continuous improvement.
Data Governance, Security & Quality
- Implement data-quality controls and validation frameworks.
- Apply data governance, security, privacy, and information-management principles.
- Support appropriate access controls, encryption, and protection of sensitive information.
- Identify and address data-quality, security, and governance risks.
- Ensure solutions comply with applicable Government of Alberta policies, standards, and directives.
Collaboration & Communication
- Work closely with product owners, business analysts, data analysts, architects, developers, and other stakeholders.
- Translate business and technical requirements into practical data engineering solutions.
- Explain complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Contribute to design reviews, architecture discussions, technical documentation, and project close-out activities.
- Provide feedback, recommendations, lessons learned, and continuous improvement opportunities.
Required Qualifications
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
Professional Experience
- Minimum 5 years of experience working as a Data Engineer and/or Data Analyst.
- Minimum 5 years of experience manipulating and extracting data from diverse on-premises and cloud-based data sources.
- Minimum 3 years of experience designing dimensional data models using Star and Snowflake schemas.
- Minimum 3 years of experience developing and maintaining reports, dashboards, and visualizations using Power BI or comparable BI technologies.
- Minimum 3 years of experience ensuring data quality, security, governance, and compliance.
- Minimum 3 years of experience with data migration across on-premises, cloud, and/or financial data environments.
- Minimum 3 years of experience with SSIS, Azure Data Factory, and APIs for data extraction and integration.
- Minimum 2 years of experience with Git, collaborative development workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and containerization.
- Minimum 2 years of experience in application development with knowledge of object-oriented and/or functional programming concepts.
- Completion of structured-query-language training or equivalent demonstrated SQL proficiency.
- Recent training or professional development related to Cloud Computing.
Preferred Qualifications
The following experience would be considered an asset:
- Experience working within the Government of Alberta or another Canadian public-sector environment.
- Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Azure SQL, or comparable database technologies.
- Experience with the Justice Online Information Network (JOIN) and/or Justice Information Management System (JIMS).
- Experience working with court, justice, legal, or other public-sector information systems.
- Experience with information-management and cybersecurity policies, standards, directives, and controls.
- Exposure to AI/ML tools and workflows.
- Experience supporting enterprise data warehouse implementations.
- Experience with IBM Cognos or modernization of legacy BI platforms.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse stakeholders