Staff Data Engineer

Hi, we are ecobee.

ecobee introduced the world’s first smart Wi-Fi thermostat to help millions of consumers save money, conserve energy, and bring home automation into their lives. That was just the beginning. We continue our pursuit to create technology that brings peace of mind into the home and allows people to focus on the moments that matter most. We take pride in making a meaningful difference to the environment, all while being part of the exciting, connected home revolution.

In 2021, ecobee became a subsidiary of Generac Power Systems. Generac introduced the first affordable backup generator and later created the category of automatic home standby generator. The company is committed to sustainable, cleaner energy products poised to revolutionize the 21st century electrical grid. Together, we take pride in making a meaningful difference to the environment.

Why we love to do what we do:

We’re helping build the world of tomorrow with solutions that improve everyday life while making a positive impact on the planet. Our products and services work in harmony to provide comfort, efficiency, and peace of mind for millions of homes and businesses. While we’re proud of what we’ve done so far, there’s still a lot we can do—and you can be part of it.

Join our extraordinary team.

We're a rapidly growing global tech company headquartered in Canada, in the heart of downtown Toronto, with a satellite office in Leeds, UK (and remote ecopeeps in the US). We get to work with some of North America and UK's leading professionals. Our colleagues are proud to bring their authentic selves to work, confident that what we do is grounded in a greater purpose. We’re always looking for curious, talented, and passionate people to join our team.

This role is open to being 100% remote within Canada while our home office is located in Toronto, Ontario. You may be required to travel to Toronto once per quarter for team and/or company events.

Who You’ll Be Joining:

You will be part of the dynamic data engineering and machine learning services group at ecobee focused on leveraging data to enhance the smart home experience for customers. This team is responsible for building and maintaining the data infrastructure and machine learning capabilities that power intelligent features across ecobee’s product ecosystem, such as integrated AI services, energy optimization, home automation, personalized climate control, predictive maintenance.

How You’ll Make an Impact:  

• Cross-Domain Problem Solving: Lead the design and implementation of scalable data pipelines and systems for complex problems that require detailed understanding across multiple domains (e.g., data, machine learning, IoT, cloud infrastructure). These problems will often come with high levels of ambiguity, incomplete data, and evolving requirements.
• Architectural Impact: Contribute to ecobee’s system architecture with designs that have been battle-tested, resulting in significant, long-lasting impact within a specific domain. Solutions are expected to integrate elegantly with ecobee’s broader enterprise architecture and align with company-wide standards.
• Enterprise-Wide Architecture: Start to think beyond individual components or domains, considering ecobee’s broader architectural strategy. Collaborate with principal engineers and directors to ensure designs complement the company’s vision.
• Technical Proposals: Propose technical solutions and strategies that have a significant impact on ecobee’s data ecosystem. These solutions should drive improvement in the scalability, performance, and resilience of the company’s products and services.
• Component Ownership: Take end-to-end ownership of full components within your domain of expertise, ensuring that their design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operations meet high standards. These components will likely interact with systems in other domains, requiring careful consideration of cross-team dependencies.
• System Operations & SLAs: Define and track SLAs for the components you own, ensuring they meet operational excellence standards and contribute to the system’s overall reliability.
• Maintainability & Scalability: Systematically consider maintainability in designs and implementations, with a focus on ensuring systems can scale to support ecobee’s growing data needs.
• Mentor & Lead: Actively mentor engineers across the organization, helping them achieve concrete technical and professional goals. Drive knowledge-sharing initiatives through code reviews, technical talks, and training sessions.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Facilitate and guide technical discussions across squads, ensuring decisions are aligned with ecobee’s strategic goals. You’ll help foster an inclusive environment where all team members feel heard and respected.
• Technical Expertise Development: Participate in “bar-raiser” groups that focus on elevating engineering standards across ecobee, including leading post-mortem reviews, design sessions, and code reviews.
• Challenging Best Practices: Continuously review existing processes, best practices, and rituals across ecobee’s engineering organization. Propose and implement improvements that enhance efficiency, collaboration, and quality.
• Delivery Metrics & Quality: Educate teams on key software delivery metrics and help track progress. Ensure that the team’s testing approaches align with accepted frameworks, and work to close gaps in quality metrics.
• Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: Foster a culture of documentation and transparency within the team and across stakeholders, ensuring that key processes and decisions are well-documented and accessible.
• Forward-Thinking Design: Anticipate future data challenges, such as scalability and security concerns, and propose strategies to avoid roadblocks. You’ll look for opportunities to improve existing solutions and identify novel approaches that haven’t been tried before.
• Technology Evaluation: Stay ahead of industry trends by evaluating and recommending new technologies that align with ecobee’s goals in data engineering, machine learning, and IoT.
• Domain-Wide Impact: Your work will have a measurable impact across multiple teams within the Data Engineering & Machine Learning Services group. This impact will often have significant customer implications, driving improvements in performance, scalability, and product capabilities.
• Economic Thinking & Risk Management: Drive a culture of thoughtful decision-making, balancing technical innovation with practical constraints like time, cost, and risk. Work closely with partner teams to prioritize capabilities that will deliver the highest business impact.
• Proactive Issue Resolution: Anticipate blockers and delays in projects before they require escalation. Proactively work to resolve these challenges by engaging with stakeholders and partner teams.

What You’ll Bring to the Table:   

• 10+ years of experience in data/software engineering, with a proven track record of owning and delivering complex, cross-domain projects at scale.
• Extensive experience in building and maintaining scalable data pipelines and architecture using tools like Apache Spark, Kafka, and Airflow.
• Expertise in cloud data platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), with a strong focus on distributed systems, cloud managed open source frameworks and services, and IoT data integration.
• Solid understanding of end-to-end data systems, from ingestion to machine learning model deployment and inference.
• Expertise in data security, data governance, and compliance regulations relevant to the industry.
• Extensive experience in data architecture, database design and data engineering methodologies across multiple industries, with at least 5 years in a technical leadership role.
• Ability to solve problems that span multiple domains, including data engineering, machine learning, IoT, and cloud infrastructure. A deep understanding of how these domains interact is essential.
• Experience with real-time data processing, analytics platforms, and machine learning integration is highly valued.
• Proven ability to mentor and guide engineers, from juniors to senior engineers, across multiple teams. Experience facilitating technical discussions and driving consensus.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives and work effectively across squads.
• A strategic mindset, with the ability to think ahead about potential roadblocks and design systems that can scale and evolve with ecobee’s needs.
• Experience driving large technical initiatives from ideation through implementation, with a focus on creating systems that deliver high business impact.
• Demonstrated track record of contributing to new processes and practices within engineering teams. You’re comfortable challenging the status quo and driving improvements.
• Experience with software delivery metrics and ensuring that teams follow best practices in testing, code quality, and maintainability.

Just so you know: The hired candidate will be required to complete a background check.

What happens after you apply:

Application review. It will happen. By an actual person in Talent Acquisition. We get upwards of 100+ applications for some roles, it can take a few days, but every applicant can expect a note regarding their application status.

Interview Process:

• A 30-minute phone call with a member of Talent Acquisition
• A 45 minutes interview with the candidate with Director of Engineering. This is to discuss experience designing and building scalable data architectures, pipelines, and processing systems.
• 90 minutes with staff and senior engineers for technical interview on System Design & Architecture and coding challenge
• 1-hour with engineering leaders for a technical deep dive discussion
• The final interview itself will be a 90 minutes interview divided into two parts where you will meet with the Director of Engineering for 45 minutes followed by a 45 minute interview with the VP

With ecobee, you’ll have the opportunity to:

• *Be part of something big: *Get to work in a fresh, dynamic, and ever-growing industry.
• *Make a difference for the environment: *Make a sustainable impact while on your daily job, and after it through programs like ecobee acts.
• *Expand your career: *Learn with our in-house learning enablement team, and enjoy our generous professional learning budget.
• *Put people first: *Benefit from competitive salaries, health benefits, and a progressive Parental Top-Up Program (75% top-up or five bonus days off).
• *Play a part on an exceptional culture: *Enjoy a fun and casual workplace with an open concept office, located at Queens Quay W & York St. ecobee Leeds is based at our riverside office on the Calls.
• *Celebrate diversity: *Be part of a truly welcoming workplace. We offer a mentorship program and bias training.

Are you interested? Let's make it work.

Our people are empowered to take ownership of their schedules with workflows that allow for flexible hours. Based on your job, you have an option of a office-based, fully remote, or hybrid work environment. New team members working remotely, will have all necessary equipment provided and shipped to them, and we conduct our interviews and onboarding sessions primarily through video.

We’re committed to inclusion and accommodation.

ecobee believes that openness and diversity make us better. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds to apply regardless of race, gender, age, religion, identity, or any other aspect which makes them unique. Accommodations can be made upon request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. Our recruitment team is happy to answer any questions candidates may have about virtual interviewing, onboarding, and future work locations.

We’re up to incredible things. Come and be part of them.

Discover our products and services and learn more about who we are.

Ready to join ecobee? View current openings.

Please note, ecobee does not accept unsolicited resumes.