AVP leading AI transformation, including fraud detection, for Manulife, a global financial services provider. Driving secure, governed Classical, Generative, and Agentic AI solutions across Corporate Functions.
About the role
- Director leading Homebase’s data engineering, data science, and applied AI teams. Building trusted data infrastructure and AI-powered tools for 150,000+ small businesses.
Responsibilities
- Own and execute the Data & AI technical roadmap across data engineering, data platform, data science, and applied AI.
- Lead and grow a 20+ person organization across four sub-teams, including managing managers and senior individual contributors.
- Recruit, develop, and retain talent while building a culture of velocity, ownership, and craft excellence.
- Own the reliability, scalability, and governance of Homebase’s data stack.
- Partner with Product and Engineering to ship AI-powered product features, including LLM-based assistants, recommendation systems, and intelligent automation.
- Own the MLOps lifecycle from experimentation through production.
- Build experimentation frameworks, guardrail metrics, and evaluation pipelines.
- Ensure models are reliable, fair, and cost-effective.
- Coach leaders and drive organization-wide adoption of AI tools, workflows, and AI-assisted development practices.
- Define standards for data quality, model monitoring, data contracts, and responsible AI use.
- Serve as the authority on data architecture and AI governance.
- Partner with Product, Growth, GTM, Finance, and CX to address data and AI needs.
Requirements
- 10+ years in data and/or AI/ML.
- At least 5 years leading teams of 8+ across data engineering, data science, or applied AI.
- Director-level leadership experience managing managers, building organizations, and driving technical strategy at scale.
- Deep technical fluency across warehousing, orchestration, transformation, BI, production ML systems, LLMs, and experimentation platforms.
- Strong product instincts connecting data and AI work to customer outcomes and business metrics.
- Active use of AI to improve workflows and experience leading teams that ship AI-powered products.
- Current knowledge of LLMs, agentic systems, and multimodal AI.
- Ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience with modern data platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, or similar.
- Familiarity with Unity Catalog, Airflow, dbt, and ML platforms such as MLflow or Baseten is a strong plus.
- Based in or willing to relocate to the Toronto area.
- Willingness to collaborate in person Tuesdays and Wednesdays at the Toronto hub.
- Bonus: experience building data and AI organizations at a SaaS or marketplace company serving SMBs.
- Bonus: background establishing data-as-a-product disciplines, including data contracts, semantic layers, or data mesh concepts.
- Bonus: experience with experimentation platforms and causal inference at scale.
Benefits
- Stock options
- TFSA/RRSP with 4% company match
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision for you and your dependents
- Flexible PTO
- Company holidays
- Designated focus periods
- Access to paid AI tools with minimal restrictions
- Maternity/Parental Leave EI top-up support offered after 6 months of service
- Work From Anywhere Month
- Meeting-free weeks yearly
- Life insurance
- Short-term disability coverage
- Long-term disability coverage
- Meals provided
- Team offsites
- Customer Days
Job title
Job type
Experience level
Salary
Degree requirement
No Education Requirement
Tech skills
Location requirements
Report this job
Found something wrong with the page? Please let us know by submitting a report below.
Generative AI Analyst validating Canadian French translations for Welo Data, a global AI data company. Reviewing and annotating multilingual AI - generated content for training and quality improvement.
Senior engineers evaluating AI coding - agent interactions for G2i. Assessing reasoning, explanations, outputs, and engineering judgment across Codex, Claude Code, and Cursor.
Manager integrating workforce management with AI transformation at TD, a major North American bank. Connecting financial, operational, and workforce planning across customer operations.
Search +AI Discovery Manager leading enterprise SEO, AI - search strategy, and client advisory for dentsu, a global integrated marketing agency. Mentoring North American SEO teams and shaping innovative search methodologies.
AI Solution Specialist helping greenhouse growers adopt Source.ag’s AI - powered crop technology. Building dashboards, automations, and custom tools while translating greenhouse insights into product improvements.
Senior Advisor designing and integrating generative AI solutions for Desjardins, North America’s largest cooperative financial group. Driving adoption through training, change management and scalable AI practices.
Strategy and management consultant creating complex business scenarios and evaluating AI outputs. Supporting Gramian Consultancy’s IT talent solutions through rigorous consulting analysis and executive deliverables.
Gartner Director Analyst shaping AI - driven technology operations guidance for CIOs. Conducting research, advising executives, and presenting modernization strategies to global clients.
Romanian AI Tutor training SpaceXAI’s Grok for multilingual speech and voice interactions. Annotating audio, translating content, and evaluating accents, pronunciation, and prosody.