Job ID: 48634

Job Category: Information & Technology

Division & Section: Technology Services, Technology Standardization Delivery

Work Location: 55 John Street; Toronto, Ontario; M5V 3C6

Job Type & Duration: Full-time, 1 Permanent, 1 Temporary (12 month) vacancies

Salary: $112,280.00 - $149,247.00
Shift Information: Monday to Friday, 35 hours per week

Affiliation: Non-Union
Number of Positions Open: 2

Posting Period: 29-AUG-2024 to 12-SEPT-2024
 

Join the City of Toronto's Technology Services Division as a Data Science and Data Visualization Lead. In this pivotal role within the Data Integration and Access unit within the Technology Services Division, you will be an integral part of our expanding Data Science and Visualization team. This team is dedicated to providing top-tier data engineering, data analytics, and data visualization services for diverse projects and clients across the organization, including Divisions such as Toronto Building and the Housing Secretariat. This position offers a unique opportunity to lead a talented team and make a significant impact on the City's data-driven initiatives.
 

As the Data Science and Data Visualization Lead, you will be responsible for prioritizing the team's workload, identifying high-impact project opportunities, and overseeing delivery of projects. You will cultivate strong relationships with clients, ensuring their needs are met with high-quality data and visualization solutions, and support data-driven decision-making processes across various divisions. You will also help drive the evolution of our business model, and set the direction for our infrastructure and tooling needs, ensuring that our practices are aligned with modern technologies and methodologies. Our group plays a crucial role in advancing the City’s capabilities in cloud-based environments for data analytics and visualization.
 

In collaboration with Technology Services and various City divisions, you will participate in major transformational initiatives, leveraging new cloud technologies, Agile methodologies, and DevOps practices. In this role you will also conduct on-demand, exploratory, and targeted data research using advanced integration and analysis tools for internal clients that support their program decision-making. Additionally, you will create and provide analytic products and visualizations that enhance the public’s awareness of City initiatives and foster greater community engagement.
 

This role requires extensive experience with data visualization tools like Tableau, proficiency in programming languages such as Python, and familiarity with SQL for database querying. You should have experience using ETL tools and or other data preparation tools. The team also uses an in-house built javascript framework for visualizations on toronto.ca, so knowledge of javascript and visualization frameworks with experience in some coding development would be beneficial. Familiarity with big data frameworks and tools such as Hadoop, Spark, and NoSQL databases; as well as, public cloud platforms (like AWS and Azure) would also be beneficial.
 

Strong analytical skills, project management experience, and the ability to lead a team of data professionals would be key for success in this role. As would be an interest in learning about new lines of business, as our clients across the City’s many Divisions are diverse in their subject matter and effective analysis of their data requires a solid capacity to absorb insights from their individual subject matters.
 

The City of Toronto offers more than just a salary. Recognized as one of Canada's best diversity employers, we provide a comprehensive benefits package, ongoing learning and professional growth opportunities, and the chance to apply your talents and skills to positively impact the lives of everyone living and visiting in Toronto. If you are passionate about data science, visualization, and making a difference in the community, we encourage you to apply for this exciting opportunity.

Major Responsibilities:
 

• Plans and develops methods and procedures for collecting, organizing, analyzing, and visualizing data, and interpreting results for use in decision making
• Develops prototypes, proofs of concepts, algorithms, predictive models, data mining and discovery, and custom analysis that leverage the value of available data sets.
• Implements detailed plans and recommends policies/procedures regarding program specific requirements.
• Performs on-demand, exploratory and targeted data research and analysis with integration and analysis tools of datasets and applies statistical analysis and modeling for applications.
• Uses leading-edge data visualization techniques to analyze and present engaging and interactive dashboards, maps and related applications.
• Supervises, motivates and trains assigned staff regarding data gathering, use, analytics, and visualization ensuring effective teamwork, high standards of work quality and organizational performance, continuous learning and encourages innovation in others.
• Supervises the day to day operation of all assigned staff including the scheduling, assigning and reviewing of work. Authorizes and co-ordinates vacation and overtime requests. Monitors and evaluates staff performance, approves salary increments, hears grievances and recommends disciplinary action when necessary.
• Provides input into and administers assigned budget, ensuring that expenditures are controlled and maintained within approved budget limitations.
• Leads, facilitates and contributes to the design, creation, development and sustainment of corporate standards for the division, including formalized project management and methodology, data warehousing architecture, data modeling, metadata, change management, and application development and migration.
• Responsible to senior management within the division, business and technical stakeholders for all aspects of assigned projects, including the project charter, project plan and schedule, progress, budget, risk management, issue management, change management, resource management, quality review/best practices.
• Provides project budget and financial management such as sole source requests; contract negotiations; leasing agreements; business cases; feasibility and cost/benefit analysis.
• Prepares and/or supervises the preparation of various formal contractual documents such as Request For Information/Proposal/Quotation (RFI/P/Q), Statement Of Work (SOW), Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) and Service Level Agreements (SLA).
• Provides leadership in the evaluation, selection and recommendation of technical solutions and professional services; manages vendors and contractors in the overall solution delivery process.
• Identifies and develops divisional/cross-divisional initiatives to produce synergies and economies of scale.
• Negotiates with senior management, clients and various stakeholders often with competing and conflicting goals, objectives and priorities.
• Provides assessments and recommendations of new technology trends on the effective use, acquisition and integration of technology by the City.
• Identifies and analyzes current business processes and practices in the context of evolving information architecture and performance measures; prepares feasibility study and recommends overall technical solutions for business initiatives and leverage existing enterprise infrastructure investments.
• Recommends and implements security, privacy and quality assurance requirements consistent with both the Municipal Freedom of Information Privacy and Protection Act (MFIPPA), and corporate and legislated standards regarding the storage, processing and retention of confidential data.
• Recommends, establishes, and sustains various project management structures that span one or more levels of government such as the Provincial Offence Act and Social Housing downloading initiatives.
• Assesses and recommends scalable multi-jurisdictional business and technical solutions that meet client and business requirements in the context of corporate standards, policies and procedures for information technologies and architectures. This includes determining requirements, conducting research and evaluations and obtaining all approvals and signoffs.
• Informs and educates senior managers, business users and technology peers on technology trends, and the effective use of business and technology solutions and information management.

Key Qualifications:

Your application for the role of Senior Systems Integrator (Data Science and Data Visualization Lead) should describe your qualifications as they relate to:
 

1. Post-secondary education in Information/Data Management, Statistics, Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, Data Science, Applied Research, or a related field or an equivalent combination of education and related experience.
2. Considerable experience with visualization and data tools, including Tableau (Desktop or Prep Builder) and Microsoft PowerBI, (ArcGIS, or R Shiny would be considered assets), and web-based tools like D3.js, Plotly, Chart.js, Leaflet, or RAWgraphs. 
3. Considerable experience with data formats including; tabular, geospatial, web services, real-time, JSON, and REST APIs.
4. Considerable experience with ETL tools and task orchestration tools such as Airflow, NiFi, FME, or Talend.
5. Experience with public cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure, GPC) and implementing, configuring and utilizing data analytics and visualization tools such as: Redshift (AWS), BigQuery (GCP), or Synapse Analytics (Azure); AWS Glue, Google Cloud Dataflow, Azure Data Factory; AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, or Azure Functions; and Amazon QuickSights, Google Data Studio, or Microsoft Power BI.
6. Experience with databases and data warehousing including organizing, compiling, manipulating, analyzing, and summarizing large datasets.
7. Experience working with WordPress, HTML, CSS and JavaScript and respective frameworks and libraries as it relates to responsive web design, user experience, cross-browser compatibility, and accessibility.

You must also have:

• Ability to lead complex data science and analytics projects, applying best practices in data science, statistics, predictive analytics, machine learning, and data visualization.
• Knowledge setting strategic priorities, developing creative solutions, and developing strategies for data science, analytics, and visualization approaches and products
• Excellent interpersonal and leadership skills with the ability to work cooperatively and professionally with City staff to gain an in-depth understanding of their individual business subject matter and translate their needs into actionable insights and products.
• Excellent communication, presentation and interpersonal skills, to interact effectively with technical staff, business unit staff, and senior management; and communicate information in a manner that is understandable to a wide range of individuals.
• Knowledge with creating queries and extracting data from relational databases (such as Oracle, SQL Server, or Postgres databases) utilizing SQL, scripts, or similar.
• Knowledge of business intelligence tools other than Tableau and statistical computing, object-oriented programming, database query languages (like R, Python, SQL), and interactive computing like Jupyter Notebooks.
• Knowledge of big data technologies such as Apache Spark, Hive, and cluster computing.
• Knowledge of content development and design for the Web, accessibility, user experience best practices, and search engine optimization would be an asset
• Knowledge of the installation, configuration, maintenance and monitoring of the Tableau Server platform.
• Highly developed people leadership skills and ability to coach and support staff development.
• Highly developed facilitation, problem-solving, and conflict resolution skills.
• Strategic thinking skills, with the ability to develop recommendations that advance the organization and improve service to the public.
• Exceptional ability to seamlessly distill very technical concepts to business users and vice versa.
• Exceptionally self-motivated and directed approach, with a keen attention to detail and organization.
• Political acuity with knowledge/leadership in government innovation.

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

The City is an equal opportunity employer, dedicated to creating a workplace culture of inclusiveness that reflects the diverse residents that we serve. Learn more about the City’s commitment to employment equity.

Accommodation

The City of Toronto is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive organization. We are committed to providing barrier-free and accessible employment practices in compliance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). Should you require Code-protected accommodation through any stage of the recruitment process, please make them known when contacted and we will work with you to meet your needs. Disability-related accommodation during the application process is available upon request. Learn more about the City’s Hiring Policies and Accommodation Process.