Platform Lead, CDCL

Engagement: Independent Contractor (1.0 FTE)
Target Start Date: Immediate start
Term: up to 21 months
Location: Canada (remote-friendly)

About the Canadian Digital Core Library (CDCL)
The Canadian Digital Core Library is a federated, standards-based, AI-ready national platform that connects provincial and territorial drill core data and makes it freely and publicly accessible. Phase 1 (July 2026 – March 2028), delivered by Creative Destruction Lab and its industry and academic collaborators, under a contribution agreement with Natural Resources Canada, builds the digital platform, publishes the Canadian standards stack, integrates initial data, completes technical assurance and demonstrates AI proof-of-concept use cases. This role provides the senior technical leadership that delivers the platform and its data.

Role Summary
The Platform Lead is the primary individual responsible for CDL’s build of the technical assets (e.g., backend infrastructure, data ingestion & processing infrastructure, and the front-end digital portal, connectivity to PT infrastructure) and for data delivery in Phase 1. The role owns the platform architecture and technical direction, leads procurement and management of the technical service providers who will deliver a significant portion of the build, and ensures the platform is secure, standards-conformant, and AI-ready.

Key Responsibilities

  • Own the end-to-end technical architecture of the federated platform, including the CDL-hosted hub node, PT-hosted node integrations, central discovery/portal services, and federation APIs, from design through to launch.
  • Lead the build of the technical assets: backend infrastructure, ETL/ingestion pipelines (schema mapping, metadata standardization, controlled-vocabulary conformance, quality validation), and the front-end digital portal.
  • Procure and manage technical service providers, integrating vendor-delivered components on schedule and to standard; a significant share of the build is delivered through external vendors.
  • Contribute to the development and publication of the Canadian CDCL standards stack, covering data and quality-conformance criteria.
  • Set and enforce the security, privacy, and compliance posture (e.g., encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, audit logging, identity management, and Canadian data residency).
  • Ensure FAIR implementation and that platform data is structured, depth-registered, and lineage-rich enough to support AI proof-of-concept development work.
  • Convene and manage the WS1 Technical Working Group – comprising industry, academic, and PT geological survey members – using it to inform the standards stack, architecture, and conformance decisions and to maintain alignment across contributors. CDCL Role Description
  • Provide technical leadership to the technical delivery team that will supporting delivery management and vendor coordination.
  • Contribute technical runbooks, integration guides, and standards-conformance documentation to the onboarding playbooks that enable future PT integration.

Required Qualifications

  • Degree in computer science, software engineering, data engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
  • 10+ years leading technical development and delivery of data platforms or comparable systems, including taking projects from design through to launch.
  • Demonstrated experience procuring and managing technical service providers, and integrating externally delivered components on schedule.
  • Proven success managing multi-stakeholder projects across government, industry, and academic participants.
  • Strong grounding in distributed or federated data architecture, API-oriented and cloud-native design, and cloud infrastructure (operational, archival, and derived-data layers).
  • Working knowledge of security, privacy, and compliance appropriate to a federally funded national data asset.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with geoscience, subsurface, or scientific data platforms (drill core, hyperspectral, GIS, or related domains).
  • Familiarity with data standards and interoperability frameworks
  • Experience implementing FAIR data principles and AI/ML-ready data pipelines.
  • Prior work within public–private-academic collaborations or contribution-agreement delivery.

Application Process
Please submit a cover letter and resume to Kyle Robinson at cdcl@creativedestructionlab.com. Applications will be assessed on a rolling basis as we are looking to fill this role by September 1, 2026.