Director of AI
Hybrid (Canada)Full-Time PermanentPosted 1mo ago
About the role
Senior AI engineering leader responsible for designing and delivering AI-enabled products and platforms across client engagements, combining AI/ML expertise with consulting, product thinking, and technical leadership.
Responsibilities
- Lead the technical strategy, architecture, and delivery of AI applications from discovery and experimentation through production and scale.
- Work with client executives, product leaders, architects, and engineering teams to identify valuable AI opportunities and translate them into achievable technical roadmaps.
- Design AI applications that combine models, enterprise data, APIs, software components, user experiences, and human workflows.
- Guide the implementation of agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, enterprise search, predictive models, and AI capabilities embedded in digital products.
- Determine when to use deterministic software, machine learning, large language models, human review, or a combination of approaches.
- Establish evaluation-driven development practices, including test datasets, error analysis, deterministic checks, model-based evaluation, and business outcome measurement.
- Ensure solutions meet production requirements for reliability, observability, scalability, latency, maintainability, security, and cost.
- Guide practices for CI/CD, model and prompt versioning, monitoring, tracing, regression testing, and ongoing optimization.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership through prototyping, architecture reviews, code reviews, troubleshooting, and delivery oversight.
- Use AI-assisted development and coding agents effectively while maintaining appropriate verification, security, and human oversight.
- Support proposals, discovery workshops, solution design, estimates, and executive presentations.
- Develop reusable AI engineering patterns, reference architectures, accelerators, and delivery standards.
- Contribute to hiring, technical mentorship, and the continued growth of APPLY’s AI capability.
Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience across software engineering, data engineering, machine learning, or related technology disciplines, including significant experience leading AI or ML solutions.
- Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating AI or machine learning applications in production—not only proofs of concept.
- Strong software engineering foundation, including system design, APIs, data architecture, testing, security, cloud infrastructure, and production operations.
- Hands-on proficiency in Python and experience with modern application, data, and AI engineering frameworks.
- Strong understanding of LLMs, RAG, context engineering, agentic workflows, tool use, structured outputs, and model evaluation.
- Experience grounding AI systems in enterprise data, including structured data, documents, semantic models, vector stores, or knowledge graphs.
- Experience establishing evaluation and error-analysis practices for systems with probabilistic outputs.
- Ability to balance model quality, reliability, latency, cost, security, and user experience.
- Experience with cloud-native architecture and production deployment on GCP, AWS, or Azure.
- Familiarity with containers, CI/CD, observability, and MLOps or LLMOps practices.
- Demonstrated success in a consulting, professional-services, or complex client-facing environment.
- Ability to move comfortably between executive conversations, product decisions, architecture discussions, and detailed technical problem-solving.
- Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences.
- A degree in computer science, software engineering, artificial intelligence, data science, or a related field—or equivalent professional experience.
Skills
Required:Experience leading AI/ML solutions in productionPythonCloud-native architectureLLMs, RAG, context engineering
Nice to have:CI/CD, MLOps/LLMOps
Benefits
- Agentic Delivery: Work on engagements with international brands and measurable client outcomes.
- An inclusive and safe environment.
- AI & Strategic Upskilling with training budgets and mentorship.
- Generous vacation policy with flexible personal time off (PTO).
- Customizable benefits for extended health and dental plans.
- Flexible work arrangements (remote, in-office, or hybrid).
- Commitment to equal opportunity and DEI initiatives.
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Apply Digital
Your global experience transformation partner
Apply Digital connects strategy to execution for global brands like Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz to deliver business impact and customer value.
strategyexecutionbusiness impactcustomer valueAIAI solutionsdigital solutions
More open roles at Apply Digital
- Senior Manager, Growth - Sports & Media1w agoHybrid (Remote) · Business Development
- Senior Project Manager2w agoHybrid (Latin America (prefer Latin America / PT or ET time alignment)) · Project Management
- Payroll & Rewards Operations Lead2w agoHybrid (Toronto, ON) · People & Culture
- BI Engineer (Data Analyst)3w agoHybrid (Latin America) · Data
- Senior Experience Designer, UI Design (Contractor)3w agoHybrid (Toronto, Canada) · Experience Design