Lead Data and AI Engineer

Sanofi EU; Toronto; On-site; CAD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Sanofi in Toronto, ON seeks an experienced Lead Data and AI Engineer to guide a data engineering organization in building and operating enterprise data pipelines and platforms. You will drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and partner with stakeholders to translate business needs into scalable data solutions.

You will lead cross-functional teams across data, AI, cloud, and security domains, shaping the roadmap and ensuring delivery excellence in a fast-transforming digital program.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data engineering or analytics/AI engineering.
• 2+ years leading engineering teams or projects.
• Experience designing and operating scalable data pipelines and platforms.
• Strong cloud-native data engineering experience, preferably Snowflake/AWS.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of data engineers with best practices.
• Design, build, deploy, and support scalable data pipelines and data products that enable analytics, AI/ML, and business use cases.
• Lead discovery and solution design discussions with business, analytics, AI, and technology teams.
• Manage team delivery, priorities, capacity planning, and execution across multiple data engineering initiatives.
• Design, develop, test, and optimize scalable data engineering solutions and reusable data assets.
• Partner with stakeholders to clarify needs and translate requirements into scalable data engineering solutions.
• Provide architectural and technical leadership across data pipeline orchestration and cloud-native platforms.
• Drive operational excellence across production data assets, including monitoring and incident response.

Skills

Leadership

Team mentoring

Stakeholder collaboration

Architectural thinking

SQL

Tools

Spark

Kafka

Snowflake

Hadoop

AWS

Informatica/IICS

Job description

Reference no. R2867104

Position title: Lead Data and AI Engineer

Department: US Commercial Data Engineering

Location: Toronto, ON

About the job

Ready to push the limits of what’s possible? Join Sanofi in one of our corporate functions and you can play a vital part in the performance of our entire business while helping to make an impact on millions around the world.

Who You Are:
You are a hands-on data and AI engineering leader with a strong background in building and operating data pipelines and platforms in complex enterprise environments. You bring a blend of technical depth, architectural thinking, and people leadership. You are comfortable guiding a team, partnering with stakeholders, and translating business needs into scalable and reliable data solutions.

You care about engineering quality, operational excellence, and continuous improvement. You have experience working across cross-functional teams and know how to balance delivery, governance, and long-term platform sustainability.

In this role, you will report directly to the Head of Data Engineering, Commercial US. You will provide architectural leadership and technical know-how across data pipeline construction, execution, and operations. You will work closely with teams across Data, Digital, Infrastructure, Cloud, Security, Agile, and key business stakeholders. You will also have direct people management responsibilities and the opportunity to shape and grow your team.

Sanofi has recently embarked into a vast and ambitious digital transformation program. A cornerstone of this roadmap is the acceleration of its data transformation and of the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions, to accelerate R&D, manufacturing and commercial performance and bring better drugs and vaccines to patients faster, to improve health and save lives.

About Sanofi

We’re an R&D-driven, AI-powered biopharma company committed to improving people’s lives and delivering compelling growth. Our deep understanding of the immune system – and innovative pipeline – enables us to invent medicines and vaccines that treat and protect millions of people around the world. Together, we chase the miracles of science to improve people’s lives.

Main Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of data engineers while fostering strong engineering practices, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement
• Design, build, deploy, and support scalable data pipelines and data products that enable analytics, AI/ML, and commercial business use cases
• Lead discovery, solution design, and technical planning discussions with business, analytics, AI, and technology teams
• Manage team delivery, priorities, capacity planning, and execution across multiple concurrent data engineering initiatives
• Design, develop, test, and optimize scalable data engineering solutions and reusable data assets that support analytics, AI/ML, and business-critical workflows across global platforms
• Partner with technical and non-technical stakeholders to clarify ambiguous business needs, shape solution approaches, and translate requirements into scalable data engineering solutions
• Provide architectural and technical leadership across data pipeline orchestration, distributed processing, cloud-native platforms, and data integration patterns
• Drive operational excellence across production data assets, including monitoring, troubleshooting, incident response, release management, and continuous improvement
• Identify opportunities to automate, simplify, standardize, and optimize data engineering processes, reusable assets, and platform capabilities
• Collaborate within cross-functional agile teams and partner with internal and external stakeholders to deliver high-quality data engineering solutions
• Contribute to and evolve data engineering standards, best practices, and community knowledge sharing across the organization
• Stay current with emerging technologies, industry trends, and modern data engineering practices to continuously improve platform capabilities and engineering effectiveness

About you

Qualifications:

• Minimum 8 years of experience in data engineering, analytics/AI engineering, or data platform development
• Minimum 2 years leading or managing engineering teams/projects
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating scalable data pipelines, data platforms, and distributed processing solutions using technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Snowflake, Hadoop, or similar
• Strong experience with cloud-native data engineering and modern ETL/ELT solutions, preferably within Snowflake / AWS-based environments; Informatica/IICS experience preferred
• Advanced SQL and data modeling skills, with working knowledge of Python and scripting languages; Scala or Java is a plus
• Experience with batch, near real-time, and streaming data architectures, as well as modern data warehouse, lake, and lakehouse concepts including data mesh principles
• Strong understanding of data architecture, scalability, reliability, performance optimization, and operational support for enterprise-grade data platforms
• Demonstrated ability to work with technical and non-