Senior Data/AI Engineer

Overview:

Guidepoint seeks an experienced Data/AI Engineer as an integral member of the Toronto-based AI team. The Toronto Technology Hub serves as the base of our Data/AI/ML team, dedicated to building a modern data infrastructure for advanced analytics and the development of responsible AI. This strategic investment is integral to Guidepoint’s vision for the future, aiming to develop cutting-edge Generative AI and analytical capabilities that will underpin Guidepoint’s Next-Gen research enablement platform and data products.

This role demands exceptional leadership and technical prowess to drive the development of next-generation research enablement platforms and AI-driven data products. You will develop and scale Generative AI-powered systems, including large language model (LLM) applications and research agents, while ensuring the integration of responsible AI and best-in-class MLOps. The Senior AI/ML Engineer will be a primary contributor to building scalable AI/ML capabilities using Databricks and other state-of-the-art tools across all of Guidepoint’s products.

Guidepoint’s Technology team thrives on problem-solving and creating happier users. As Guidepoint works to achieve its mission of making individuals, businesses, and the world smarter through personalized knowledge-sharing solutions, the engineering team is taking on challenges to improve our internal application architecture and create new AI-enabled products to optimize the seamless delivery of our services.

This is a hybrid position based in Toronto.

What You'll Do:

• Architect and Build Production Systems: Design, build, and operate scalable, low-latency backend services and APIs that serve Generative AI features, from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to complex agentic systems.
• Own the AI Application Lifecycle: Own the end-to-end lifecycle of AI-powered applications, including system design, development, deployment (CI/CD), monitoring, and optimization in production environments like Databricks and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Optimize RAG Pipelines: Continuously improve retrieval and generation quality through techniques like retrieval optimization (tuning k-values, chunk sizes), using re-rankers, advanced chunking strategies, and prompt engineering for hallucination reduction.
• Integrate Intelligent Systems: Engineer solutions that seamlessly combine LLMs with our proprietary knowledge repositories, external APIs, and real-time data streams to create powerful copilots and research assistants.
• Champion LLMOps and Engineering Best Practices: Collaborate with data science and engineering teams to establish and implement best practices for LLMOps, including automated evaluation using frameworks like LLM Judges or MLflow, AI observability, and system monitoring.
• Evaluate and Implement AI Strategies: Systematically evaluate and apply advanced prompt engineering methods (e.g., Chain-of-Thought, ReAct) and other model interaction techniques to optimize the performance and safety of proprietary and open-source LLMs.
• Mentor and Lead: Provide technical leadership to junior engineers through rigorous code reviews, mentorship, and design discussions, helping to elevate the team's engineering standards.
• Influence the Roadmap: Partner closely with product and business stakeholders to translate user needs into technical requirements, define priorities, and shape the future of our AI product offerings.

What You Have:

• Experience: A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field with 6+ years of professional experience; or a Master’s degree with 4+ years of professional experience in backend software engineering and Generative AI . This must include a proven track record of designing, building, and scaling distributed, production-grade systems.
• Strong Software Engineering Fundamentals: Deep expertise in Python, a major backend framework (e.g., FastAPI, Flask), and asynchronous programming (e.g., asyncio). Proficiency in designing RESTful APIs, microservices, and the complete operational lifecycle, including comprehensive testing, CI/CD (e.g., ArgoCD), observability, monitoring, alerting, maintaining high uptime, and executing zero-downtime deployments.
• Cloud & Infrastructure Proficiency: Hands-on experience deploying and managing applications on a major cloud platform (Azure preferred, AWS/GCP acceptable) using containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes, Helm).
• Production AI Application Experience: 2+ years of experience building applications that leverage large language models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini. Direct experience with modern LLM patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), hybrid search using vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Elasticsearch), multi-agent AI systems with tool calls, and prompt engineering is required.
• AI System Design and Evaluation: Experience designing and implementing robust evaluation frameworks for LLM-based systems, including rubric-based scoring, LLM Judges, or using tools like MLflow, alongside monitoring for performance and drift.
• Large-Scale Data Processing: Familiarity with large-sca