Data Engineer / Architect

Job description

Location: Hybrid, Montreal Type: Full-time, permanent role. Competitive salary plus meaningful equity and benefits. About the Role Every business we acquire arrives with its own data — its own systems, its own schemas, its own decades of quirks — and none of it was designed to talk to anything else. Making sense of that, and building the architecture that lets it all connect, is one of the most important things we do. This role owns it: the data foundations that everything we build sits on top of. We're looking for someone who's genuinely comfortable in that ambiguity — mapping data fields between systems that were never meant to align, standing up integrations, and designing the architecture of large data systems from scratch. There's a real spectrum to how technical this can be, and we'll shape the role around your strengths. You'll have deep ownership over how our data is structured, moved, and trusted across the company. This Is Not For You If… You need clean, well-documented data sources rather than the tangle of real acquired systems. You want the architecture handed to you rather than designing it from a blank page. You'd rather specialize narrowly than own data foundations end to end. Mapping messy fields between mismatched systems sounds like a chore, not a puzzle you'd enjoy. What You'll Do Design and own the architecture of our data systems — how data is modeled, stored, moved, and made reliable across the company. Map and reconcile data across the different businesses we acquire, aligning systems that were never built to fit together. Build and maintain the integrations and pipelines that connect acquired businesses into our platform. Set the standards for data quality, structure, and access that everything else depends on. Partner closely with engineering, product, and operations to make sure the data serves what we're building. Who You Are You've designed data architecture or infrastructure for real, large systems — ideally more than once. You're at home mapping and integrating messy, mismatched data from scratch, and you like the puzzle. Strong instincts for data modeling, pipelines, and the trade-offs that keep a system reliable as it grows. You thrive in ambiguity and want deep ownership over the foundations, not just a piece of them. Nice to Haves Experience integrating data across acquisitions, mergers, or otherwise disparate systems. Fluency with modern data tooling and cloud data platforms. Interest in the physical, built world and the operational data that runs it. How to Apply Please send us either a short Loom video (preferred), your CV or a brief summary of your experience. Our Chief of Staff, Alexandra Kiekens, will reach out to you via LinkedIn to schedule a short 10-minute introductory phone call as the first step of the interview process. About Meroka Meroka exists to create generational wealth for the people who run the local economy — to power those who power everyday life. Practically, we acquire physical-economy, blue-collar, built-world businesses and enable them with technology so they can last forever. We're focused on longevity and succession. We don't roll everything up under one brand — we preserve each company's local name, its autonomy, and the hard-won knowledge of the operators who built it. Here's what gets us out of bed: the physical world is starved for labor while demand for building and infrastructure keeps climbing. Build genuinely good systems for it and you don't shrink the workforce — you grow it. More work, better jobs, better pay, better benefits, and a better life for the frontline workers who keep everyday life running and who've been overlooked by technology for decades. That's the wealth we're trying to create, and we're starting in Canada with room to expand internationally over time. We've raised roughly $25M CAD from Slow Ventures, 8VC, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Interplay, and others. Our first business is acquired, with many more to come. Between us, the founding team has built and run construction-tech businesses at real scale (think $100M in revenue and 600+ people), invested as venture capitalists, led M&A for public companies, designed novel deal structures and joint ventures, run manufacturing lines, and started companies of our own — some that worked, some that taught us a lot. So while this is an early-stage company where you'll have outsized impact, it comes with the runway and stability of a company that's already raised real capital and closed real deals. We also get everyone together twice a year at an offsite, because in-person is how we work best, and because it's fun. We have one foot on the job site and one foot in Silicon Valley. A morning building product and talking to top-tier investors; an afternoon in a truck headed to a site to see how the work actually gets done — steel-toe boots optional, but you'll want them eventually. And because we own our customers, you build and deploy to real businesses without sales cycles or convincing anyone to adopt you. Even a handful of acquisitions touches tens of thousands of households and thousands of frontline workers — the work you do here will be felt by millions downstream within a few years.