Sr. AWS EMR Admin

Location: Canada

Department: Data Engineering

Workplace: remote

Employment Type: full

Description

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Senior AWS EMR Administrator to manage, optimize, and scale our cloud data infrastructure. In this hands-on technical role, you will be responsible for designing, deploying, and maintaining persistent and transient AWS EMR clusters to support large-scale batch data processing pipelines. You will collaborate closely with data engineering teams and leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to ensure reliable, secure, and automated operations across our AWS ecosystem.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

• Cluster Management: Architecture, deploy, and maintain persistent and transient AWS EMR clusters tailored to business workloads and operational needs.
• Infrastructure Automation: Design and implement deployment automation using AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodePipeline, or Terraform.
• Storage & Compute Optimization: Manage AWS EC2, S3, and related compute and storage resources to ensure high performance, security, and cost efficiency.
• Data Pipeline Support: Monitor and support batch data processing workloads, troubleshooting performance bottlenecks and operational issues across the EMR environment.
• System Administration: Perform routine maintenance, patching, scaling, access controls, and security configurations across EMR and associated AWS services.

Required Qualifications

• Experience: 7–8+ years of hands-on experience in AWS Cloud Infrastructure and AWS EMR Administration.
• Core AWS Technical Stack: Strong proficiency with AWS EMR, EC2, S3, CloudFormation, and batch data environments.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & CI/CD: Demonstrated experience deploying cloud resources using AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, and AWS CodePipeline (or equivalent CI/CD tools).
• EMR Architecture: Deep technical understanding of Amazon EMR architecture, cluster life cycles, and node configurations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Hadoop ecosystem, HDFS, and Big Data technologies.
• Exposure to AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) and containerized workloads.
• Hands-on experience with Kerberos authentication and enterprise security integration.

Benefits

Significant career development opportunities exist as the company grows. The position offers a unique opportunity to be part of a small, challenging, and entrepreneurial environment, with a high degree of individual responsibility.