Snowflake Platform Engineer

Company Information: CIBC Mellon is a leading provider of asset servicing solutions to institutional investors in Canada, including multi-currency accounting, fund valuation, and investment information reporting. We are passionate about providing exceptional client service backed by our culture of innovation and success. Our outstanding employee experience will provide you with opportunities to learn and grow professionally while supporting the communities in which you live and work.

We are a diverse and dynamic workplace where employees take an active role in delivering on strategic objectives while advancing their individual career goals. We encourage innovative thinking and give our employees the support and resources they need to turn great ideas into actions.

We’re always looking for talented people who can make a meaningful difference for our clients, our company and our communities. To learn more about why our employees love coming to work each day, visit www.cibcmellon.com/experience.

Position Overview: Reporting into the Assistant Vice President, Data Engineering the Snowflake Platform Engineer is responsible for the ownership, governance, and ongoing evolution of the enterprise data platform. Serving as the subject-matter expert for Snowflake, this senior individual-contributor designs scalable ingestion pipelines, enforces platform security, and champions modern architectural patterns. The role leverages Snowflake’s AI and governance capabilities to drive organizational value. The engineer collaborates closely with data engineers, analytics engineers, data scientists, and business stakeholders, functioning as both a hands-on practitioner and internal advisor. Decisions made in this role directly impact the reliability, cost-efficiency, and strategic direction of the cloud data ecosystem.

Responsibilities: Platform Architecture & Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain a production-grade Snowflake environment aligned to Medallion Architecture principles (Bronze / Silver / Gold layers), ensuring clear data lineage, quality contracts, and promotion workflows across all tiers;
• Architect and optimise multi-cluster virtual warehouses, resource monitors, and auto-scaling policies to balance performance against cost;
• Lead the technical roadmap for the Snowflake platform, evaluating new features and native capabilities against business needs.

Data Ingestion & Integration

• Design and operate Snowpipe, dbt, DAGs for low-latency, continuous data ingestion and data orchestration;
• Implement and manage OpenFlow (Snowflake's native data flow orchestration) to automate end-to-end data movement with observable, auditable pipelines.

Security, Governance & Compliance

• Own the RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) framework — design and maintain role hierarchies, functional roles, object-level privileges, row-access policies, and column masking policies at enterprise scale;
• Administer and extend Snowflake Horizon Catalog to manage and discover data assets, enforce data quality rules, apply sensitivity classifications, and publish the enterprise data catalog for internal consumers;
• Implement and monitor data governance controls including dynamic data masking, object tagging, data classification, and lineage tracking through Horizon.

AI & Advanced Analytics

• Drive adoption of Snowflake Cortex AI — deploy and fine-tune Cortex LLM functions, Cortex Search, and Cortex Analyst to enable natural-language querying and AI-powered data products;
• Identify and prototype new use cases for AI-assisted data transformation, anomaly detection, and intelligent alerting within the platform.

Operations & Reliability

• Establish and maintain platform observability: query profiling, cost attribution dashboards, warehouse utilisation metrics, and alerting;
• Own platform incident response for data availability and performance issues; define and enforce SLOs / SLAs for critical data pipelines;
• Manage Snowflake account-level configurations including network policies, private link connectivity, Tri-Secret Secure key management, and Business Critical features.

Enablement & Standards

• Define and enforce coding standards, CI/CD patterns, and Infrastructure-as-Code practices for platform provisioning;
• Mentor data engineers and serve as the escalation point for complex Snowflake questions across the organisation;
• Produce documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records (ADRs) that raise the collective engineering bar.

Qualifications: Education/Experience

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical experience);
• 8+ years of hands-on experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or a closely related field;
• 5+ years working directly with Snowflake in a production environment at enterprise scale

Specific Knowledge & Skills (not preferred or an asset)

• RBAC – role hierarchies, masking & row-access policies
• Dbt Cloud and DAG orchestration configuration, with CI/CD integration
• Snowpipe and OpenFlow (Snowflake data flow orchestration)
• Medallion Architecture (Bronze / Silver / Gold) and practical implementation experience
• Cortex AI (LLM functions, Cortex Search, Cortex Analyst)
• Horizon Catalog (data discovery, classification, lineage)
• Snowpark (Python / Java / Scala)
• Dynamic Data Masking & Object Tagging
• Query optimisation & warehouse performance tuning

Additional Technical Requirements

• Strong proficiency in SQL and at least one programming language used within Snowpark (Python strongly preferred);
• Experience designing and operating data pipelines using dbt, Airflow, or equivalent transformation/orchestration tooling;
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and associated storage services (S3, ADLS, GCS);
• Demonstrated experience with CI/CD pipelines and version control (Git) applied to data platform development.

Preferred Qualifications

• Snowflake SnowPro Core certification; SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer or Architect certification strongly preferred;
• Experience with Snowflake Native Apps Framework or Marketplace data sharing;
• Familiarity with Apache Iceberg or open table formats integrated with Snowflake;
• Background in financial services, healthcare, or other regulated industries with strict data governance requirements;
• Prior experience leading or mentoring a team of data engineers in a Canadian Financial Services industry setting.

CIBC Mellon's Values: Get it Right Every Day: Deliver service excellence while always acting with the highest ethical standards Put Clients at the Centre: Advocate for clients by listening, sharing knowledge, and bringing the right solutions forward Be One Family: Challenge, empower and recognize your colleagues Take Ownership: Speak up, speak out, and make things better

Job Specific Competencies:

• The salary band for this position ranges between $98,000 - $148,000
• Individual pay is determined by factors such as job-related skills, market conditions, relevant experience, education, training, and internal equity.
• Please note, our recruitment process may include the use of AI-assisted tools.
• This posting is for an existing vacancy.