Manager, Data Platform

Sporting Life Group is a proudly Canadian family of retail banners, Sporting Life, Golf Town, and Team Town Sports, united by a shared passion for sport and active living.
From individual pursuits to team sports, we offer the best equipment, expert services, and experiences to help Canadians play, move, and live well.
Why Work Here?
- Access to our benefits package, with the choice of different levels of health, dental, and vision coverage to suit you.
- Employee discounts at Golf Town, Sporting Life, and Team Town Sports that are shareable with friends and family.
- Team-first culture that celebrates an active, sports lifestyle.
- Fun, fast-paced hybrid environment where your passion for sport and style belongs.
- Vendor Pro Deals and expert product training to fuel your knowledge and performance.
- Competitive pay and opportunities to grow your career in sports lifestyle.

What You'll Do;
As Manager, Data & AI you will lead, modernize, and operationalize our data ecosystem while building scalable, intelligent, and automated data solutions that drive business value.
Within this role, you will combine your hands-on technical depth with people leadership experience, guiding a team of data engineers, BI developers, and AI practitioners while actively architecting and delivering platform modernization and AI/ML-driven automation initiatives across the organization.
Platform Ownership & Technical Execution
- Architect, design, and maintain modern data platforms leveraging Azure Synapse Analytics, Fabric, Power BI, Data Factory, and Azure SQL.
- Lead ETL/ELT modernization with scalable pipelines (batch and streaming) ensuring data quality, observability, and governance.
- Drive upgrades, migrations, and adoption of Fabric, Synapse advancements, and best practices in the Azure data ecosystem.
- Build and manage lakehouse, data warehouse, and data mart structures to enable business analytics and AI workloads.
- Oversee Power BI governance, semantic models, and performance tuning of large datasets for enterprise reporting.

Lead AI/ML & Advanced Analytics
- Use Azure ML, Python/R, and Fabric for building, training, and deploying models.
- Integrate predictive and prescriptive analytics within data pipelines.
- Operationalize ML models (MLOps) for monitoring, retraining, and scalability.
- Collaborate with business teams to identify and prioritize AI/ML opportunities for automation and decision support.

Team Leadership & Upskilling
- Manage and mentor a high-performing data engineering and AI team, providing technical guidance, coaching, and career development.
- Foster a learning culture with upskilling in AI/ML, advanced Fabric capabilities, Synapse, and data pipeline best practices.
- Establish clear standards, best practices, and documentation within the team for sustainable scaling.
- Conduct code reviews and design reviews while empowering the team to take ownership.
- Stay up to date with emerging laws, regulations, and standards related to AI ethics and compliance (e.g., EU AI Act, NIST, ISO standards)

Strategic & Cross-Functional Leadership
- Partner with business stakeholders, analytics teams, and IT to align the data platform roadmap with business objectives.
- Define and execute the data platform and AI strategy, including modernization plans and cloud optimization initiatives.
- Lead data governance practices, ensuring data security, privacy, lineage, and cataloging.
- Track and report KPIs on platform performance, pipeline health, and AI model impact to leadership.

What your Bring;
- 8+ years in data engineering, BI, or analytics, with 3+ years in technical management or lead role.
- Strong expertise Azure Synapse, Fabric, Data Factory, Power BI, Azure SQL.
- Experience in ETL/ELT pipeline design and orchestration and data. modeling for lakehouse and warehouse architectures.
- Hands-on experience with AI/ML workflows.
- Model development using Python/R/SQL.
- Deployment and monitoring in production environments (MLOps).
- Familiarity with data governance, security, and compliance frameworks.
- Demonstrated ability to lead teams while remaining hands-on with architecture, development, and debugging.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence stakeholders and translate technical concepts to business value.
- Experience with D365FnO and Salesforce Service Cloud are an asset.

**Preferred Qualifications**:

- Azure Certifications (Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Fabric-related).
- Experience with Power Platform and automation tools (Power Automate, Logic Apps).
- Experience with real-time streaming architectures (Event Hub, Kafka).
- Exposure to DevOps/GitOps practices for CI/CD within data pipelines.
- Experience in cost optimization and performance tuning in Azure data environments.

Sporting Life Group is an equal opportunity employer and committed to providing accommodations for persons with disabilities. In accordance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, pl