Staff Data Engineer

Afresh; Ontario; Remote; CAD 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a mission-driven company focused on reducing food waste through innovative AI solutions. As a Staff Data Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in enhancing customer data integration and processing, directly impacting our ability to deliver fresh food efficiently. You'll design robust ETLs, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and tackle complex data challenges. This role offers a unique opportunity to make a significant social impact while working with cutting-edge technology in a supportive and collaborative environment. If you thrive on solving real-world problems and want to contribute to a sustainable future, we invite you to be part of our journey.

Benefits

Mission-driven work

Collaborative team environment

Cutting-edge technology

Flexible working hours

Qualifications

• Significant experience with ETLs for large-scale datasets.
• Proficiency in Python, PySpark, SQL, and related tools.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement ETLs for processing large volumes of customer data.
• Build tools to streamline customer integrations and onboarding.

Skills

ETL Design and Maintenance

Python

PySpark

SQL

Databricks

Snowflake

DBT

Problem-Solving

Communication Skills

Leadership

Tools

Databricks

Snowflake

DBT

Job description

Afresh is on a mission to eliminate food waste and make fresh food accessible to all. Our first A.I.-powered solution optimizes ordering, forecasting, and store operations for fresh food departments in brick-and-mortar grocers. With our Fresh Operating System, regional and national grocery retailers have placed $1.6 billion in produce orders across the US and we've helped our partners prevent 34 million pounds of food from going to waste. Working at Afresh represents a one-of-a-kind opportunity to have massive social impact at scale by leveraging uncommonly impactful software – we hope you'll join us!

About the Role

As a Staff Data Engineer, you’ll play a key role in scaling and improving how we integrate and process customer data. You will design and implement ETLs that reliably process large volumes of customer-provided data and build tools to make customer integrations faster, more accurate, and more scalable. You’ll also contribute to the development of new features that support our expanding product lines. Your work will have a direct and visible impact on our ability to onboard customers easier and quicker and power our machine learning grocery solution.

What to Expect

• Build tools and frameworks that streamline customer integrations, enabling faster onboarding and better handling of customer data.
• Create robust ETLs in PySpark and DBT to process billions of records from customer datasets, ensuring data is accurate, reliable, and ready for downstream use.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and go-to-market teams to design and deliver data solutions for new products and features.
• Identify and implement optimizations to improve ETL runtime and data processing scalability, reducing the time and effort required for integrations.
• Solve real-world data quality challenges by working directly with messy, incomplete, or inconsistent customer data to extract the signal we need.
• Investigate and implement new technologies into the data platform, focusing on practical solutions that address current pain points and anticipate future needs.
• Support team members by mentoring engineers, leading technical discussions, and providing clear, actionable feedback.

Skills and Experience

We encourage all highly-qualified candidates to apply, even if they don’t meet every listed qualification.

• Significant experience designing and maintaining ETLs that process large-scale datasets.
• Proficiency with Python, PySpark, SQL, and experience working on platforms/tools like Databricks, Snowflake, or DBT.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work with ambiguous or incomplete requirements to deliver concrete, impactful solutions.
• A focus on practical outcomes—you're skilled at balancing technical rigor with the need to get things done.
• Experience working directly with complex, unclean datasets and finding innovative ways to process and analyze them.
• A knack for identifying areas where tooling or automation can simplify workflows and reduce manual effort.
• Excellent communication skills—you’re able to explain your ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Proven leadership in technical projects, with a willingness to mentor and help others grow.

Why Work Here

• Join a mission-driven company reducing millions of pounds of food waste in grocery stores per year.
• Work on challenging, real-world problems that have a direct impact on our customers.
• Be part of a collaborative, supportive team where your ideas are valued and acted on.
• Use cutting-edge tools and platforms to solve meaningful data challenges.

We’re looking for someone who thrives on tackling complex data problems and takes pride in building systems that work seamlessly at scale. If that sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you!

Salary Range in CAD:

About Afresh

Founded in 2017, Afresh is working on the #1 solution to curb climate change: reducing food waste. By combining human insight and transformative technology, we're helping grocers provide fresher food to customers at more affordable prices.

Afresh sits at an incredible intersection of positive social impact, rocket ship financial growth, and cutting-edge technology. Our best-in-class AI research has been published in top journals including ICML, and we've raised over $148 million in funding from investors including former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market Walter Robb and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors.

Fresh is the past, present, and future of our food system – the waste we create today will impact our planet for years to come. Join us as we continue to build a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive team that embodies our company’s values of proactivity, kindness, candor, and humility.

Afresh provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

Here at Afresh, many of our employees work remotely provided that they reside in one of the following states: AR, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, KY, MA, MI, MT, MO, NV, NJ, NY, NC, OR, PA, TX, WA, WI. However, there may be key roles that will require a candidate/employee to be local to our San Francisco, CA office. In which case this requirement will be included in the job posting details under "Skills and experience" for reference.