Tech Lead, Data (Remote First)
Zensurance
Toronto, ON, Canada
Posted on Feb 26, 2025
About Us:
Zensurance is redefining commercial insurance for Canadian businesses.
As a leading InsurTech, we make getting the right coverage simple, fast, and accessible through a digital-first experience. Our platform combines advanced technology with deep industry expertise to deliver tailored insurance solutions that help businesses thrive.
Zensurance has been recognized for its rapid growth and industry impact:
At Zensurance, we value ownership, collaboration, and innovation. Our team thrives on solving complex challenges, challenging the status quo, and making a real impact in an industry ready for change.
If you're looking to build something meaningful in a fast-growing, customer-focused company, we’d love to hear from you!
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.
Benefits & Perks at Zensurance:
At Zensurance, we know that when our people thrive, so does our business. That’s why we offer a flexible, people-first work environment designed to support your well-being, growth, and success.
💻 Work Your Way
• Remote-first setup for added flexibility
• Home office allowance to create a comfortable workspace
• Top-tier tech: "Office in a box" with all necessary tech equipment
• Half days before public holidays: Enjoy half days before long weekends
❤️ Your Health, Your Way
• Flexible health and dental plans for families, including mental health support
• Health & personal spending accounts to invest in wellness your way
• Parental leave top-up, because family comes first
🚀 Investing in Your Growth
• Education assistance reimbursement for courses, conferences, books, and memberships
• Opportunities to learn from industry experts and grow your career
🤝 Staying Connected
• Weekly Friday huddles to share updates and connect across teams
• Virtual & in-person team-building events to strengthen our culture
We’re building something special. Come be a part of it!
Who We Are:
Business is hard work, but insurance doesn’t have to be!
We empower business owners with simple, tech-driven insurance solutions through our online platform.
Our success is fueled by our team-oriented culture and four core values:
DELIVER – We set ambitious goals and achieve them.
INCLUDE – We foster an open and safe space for all.
INTEGRITY – We do what’s right.
INVENT – We create straightforward, innovative solutions.
Diversity & Inclusion:
Zensurance celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive environment. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and provide accommodations throughout the hiring process. If you need support, let us know, we’re here to help.
Thank You!
We review every application with care to find the best fit for our team.
While we may take a little time to get back to you due to the high volume of applications we receive, know that a real human (not a bot!) is reviewing yours. We appreciate your patience and can't wait to learn more about you!