Staff Data Engineer at commonsku in Toronto, CA

🌟 Ready to help reshape a $26B industry and build the future of branded merch?

commonsku is revolutionizing the promotional products industry. Our platform empowers branded merch distributors to work smarter — managing projects, building quotes, placing orders, and collaborating with clients and suppliers seamlessly through the power of the Connected Workflow.

We’re a remote-first, community-driven team obsessed with elevating our customers, their clients, and the broader industry. Our values – Community First, Ten Steps Ahead, Fast Forward, and Delightful Work – guide us. We believe you can innovate, push forward, and do more, while also sharing a laugh, supporting your colleagues, and having a life outside of work.

We’re also proud to be officially recognized as a Certified Great Place to Work® in Canada.

If you’re energized by ambitious work, creative collaboration, and helping to build something great, you’ll want to keep reading.

🚀 About the Role: Staff Data Engineer

As our team expands, we are looking for a Staff Data Engineer to partner with our Data team! In this position, you will architect and maintain a reliable, seamless, and high-impact analytics layer that drives strategic choices across every product vertical and operational unit.

Our core data pipeline is already up and running, routing info from MySQL into Snowflake via Fivetran, transformed with dbt, and visualized inside Metabase. Now, we’re scaling up to refine our modeling standards, strengthen governance, and unlock deeper insights, giving you an immense opportunity to influence our technical roadmap. Immediate impact areas include launching our flagship distributor benchmarks and powering agentic AI query access for company-wide decision-making.

You will partner with cross-functional talent across product and engineering, champion a culture of trust and technical excellence, and directly contribute to transforming our industry for the better.

💡 About You

You’re not just looking for a job — you’re looking for a place to do your best work. You bring:

• A community mindset — You see customers as partners and coworkers as collaborators. You lift others up, always follow through on your commitments, and thrive in a team that does the same. (Community First)

• Momentum and ownership — You act with optimism, take initiative, and turn ideas into results. You move fast and bring others with you. (Fast Forward)

• Vision and boldness — You don’t just react — you anticipate. You think big, challenge the status quo, and push the work (and the industry) forward. (Ten Steps Ahead)

• Joy in the craft — You care deeply about what you build and how it makes people feel. You bring thoughtfulness, transparency, and a welcoming sense of humour to the table. (Delightful Work)

⚙️ About our Technology

Guided by our value of being Ten Steps Ahead, we are modernizing our technology to support a rapidly scaling business and user base.

Our core foundation for the Data Team is built on Snowflake. The rest of our tech stack is built on PHP, Python, React, mySQL and our infrastructure is in AWS.

Innovation remains central to our roadmap. We are pushing the boundaries of the industry by building AI features powered by OpenAI, Gemini and Anthropic APIs.

🛠️ What You’ll Do

This role balances hands-on engineering and analytics work with growing ownership, decision-making, and mentorship. Here’s what you’ll do:

• Technical Leadership & Modeling — Guide key initiatives from inception through completion by applying robust software design principles. Transform raw transactional records into elegant star schemas that reflect our core platform domain, including orders, merch distributors, suppliers, catalog offerings, and financial workflows. (Ten Steps Ahead)

• Data Trust & Governance — Preemptively identify and fix sluggish queries, unoptimized transformations, and testing blind spots before end-users notice. Champion overall pipeline health by overseeing automated Fivetran syncs and adapting to schema modifications seamlessly as our business scales. (Fast Forward)

• Canonical Metrics Architecture — Establish and safeguard standardized logic within our dbt data marts, ensuring all downstream Metabase visualizations draw from a unified, trusted source of truth.

• Empowering Self-Serve Access — Construct intuitive Snowflake and Metabase layers that enable team members to query insights independently and roll up your sleeves for complex exploratory deep dives.

• Collaboration & Mentorship — Elevate fellow engineers and analysts through strong and goal-driven mentorship, thoughtful pull request reviews and ongoing support. Partner closely with product leads and engineering managers to translate strategic objectives into clear technical milestones, maintaining open communication around progress and challenges. (Community First)

• AI-Powered Acceleration — Leverage modern AI coding assistants like Cursor, CodeRabbit, and Claude to boost your daily efficiency, combining automated velocity with rigorous human verification. Be the example to the team on how to use the AI tools available. (Delightful Work)

🔍 What You Bring

Some of the qualities that help you thrive in this role:

• Professional Experience: 8+ years of experience in analytics engineering, data engineering, or a closely related role, ideally within a SaaS or product-driven environment.

• Technical Expertise: Strong production experience with SQL, dbt, and a cloud data warehouse (Snowflake or comparable), alongside proficiency in Python for analytics tooling and automation.

• Data Modeling Knowledge: Deep understanding of dimensional modeling, relational databases, managed ingestion (Fivetran), and designing BI environments (Metabase) for self-serve use.

• Mentorship Skills: A proven track record of mentoring and developing engineers or analysts, with a focus on building a healthy, collaborative, and inclusive team culture.

• Mindset: A balance of technical excellence with pragmatic business tradeoffs, a strong sense of customer empathy, and a dedication to continuous growth and feedback.

• AI Enthusiasm: Experience using AI-assisted development tools effectively and pushing the boundaries of how AI improves daily workflows. Experience using Snowflake AI tooling (or similar) to accelerate solutions for business needs.

💰 Compensation & Perks

We believe in fair, transparent compensation. Starting salary for this role is $160,000–$180,000, depending on previous experience and skillset. New hires are expected to come in at the midpoint of this range.

However, if this role sounds perfect for you and your expectations are outside of this range, we encourage you to apply and let us know in your application about your ideal package. If we agree that it’s a good fit, we will have open discussion around what’s possible.

Plus:

• Remote-first culture (with plenty of excellent in-person experiences sprinkled in)

• Company-wide closure between December 25th and January 1st

• Health and dental benefits, including a $1,000 healthcare spending account

• RRSP/TFSA contributions up to $3,000 a year (no employee contribution required!)

• Twice-yearly company wide summits (we call it HQ and you’ll love it)

• A delightful team of smart people who are good at what they do

🌎 Location

This role is open to candidates eligible to work in Canada, with the exception of Quebec (we’re not set up to operate there yet — désolé!).

We’re remote-first, but if you’re based in Toronto, even better. That’s where we were founded and where we maintain our HQ today!

🌱 A Bit More About Us

commonsku supports hundreds of promotional products distributors and suppliers with technology that drive efficiency, growth, and connection. Our skummunity (commonsku + community = skummunity, get it?) is powered by events, education, and shared knowledge and is core to who we are.

We’ve grown by being “for promo by promo” and now, we’re scaling our impact to elevating an entire industry. We’d love your help doing it.

🤖 A Note About AI

We use AI every day at commonsku to be faster and better. If you use AI tools to help you draft your resume or cover letter, that’s totally fine — just make sure what you submit reflects you.

In the spirit of transparency, we also use AI to help us work smarter. We utilize Teamtailor’s AI features to assist with applicant screening, note-taking, and interview recording. This technology helps us move quickly and efficiently, but it does not replace our judgment. A member of our Talent team reviews every resume and conducts every interview, ensuring that a human always makes the decision on who advances in our process.

📬 How to Apply

If this role feels like a fit, apply now at https://commonsku.com/careers!

We try our level best to review and respond to every application we receive. So, once you’ve applied, wait to hear from a member of our People team with an update. If it looks like a good fit, expect a phone interview as the first step.

By the way, you don’t need to meet 100% of the requirements — we value potential, learning, and diversity of thought. Tell us why you're excited, and let’s chat.

❤️ commonsku is an Equal Opportunity Employer

We’re committed to building a diverse team that reflects the skummunity we serve. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds, experiences, and identities.