Senior Consultant, ML/AI Engineer, Data & AI

About the role

Toast is recruiting on behalf of a global audit, tax and advisory firm with a Data and AI practice that uses advanced analytics, machine learning and generative AI to help major organizations solve their toughest challenges. It is looking for a Senior Consultant, ML/AI Engineer who is technically strong, business minded and ready to design, build and scale AI solutions to production. The role is open in Toronto, Vancouver or Calgary.

Key responsibilities

• Partner with clients to understand their business problems and find opportunities to apply AI and advanced analytics
• Translate business and analytical requirements into end-to-end ML and AI solution designs
• Carry out hands-on ML engineering, including exploratory data analysis, data preparation and model development for forecasting, classification, recommendation and anomaly detection
• Build models using Python and tools such as scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Azure ML Studio and Databricks MLflow
• Develop and optimize AI and GenAI solutions on platforms such as AI Foundry, GCP Vertex AI, AWS SageMaker and Bedrock
• Operationalize ML pipelines with MLOps best practices, including deployment, versioning, CI/CD, automated testing and monitoring
• Implement model monitoring, performance tuning, drift detection and retraining in production
• Work with data engineers to ensure reliable, scalable data pipelines for training and inference
• Apply responsible AI principles, including explainability, bias detection, model governance and security and privacy compliance
• Support client workshops, technical discussions and stakeholder presentations on AI strategy and implementation

Required profile

• University degree in computer science, engineering, data science, mathematics or a related field
• 3+ years of professional experience in machine learning, data science, AI engineering or a related field, with a track record of production ML solutions
• Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with ML frameworks and platforms
• Solid understanding of ML algorithms, statistics, model evaluation and feature engineering
• Experience designing end-to-end ML pipelines and practical MLOps experience
• Experience deploying models to the cloud (Azure, AWS or GCP)
• Experience with generative AI, LLMs, prompt engineering or RAG
• Strong consulting and communication skills, and proven ability to work in cross-functional teams

Nice to haves

• Familiarity with Spark or other big data frameworks
• Experience fine-tuning foundational models
• Cloud AI or ML certifications (e.g., Azure AI Engineer Associate, AWS Machine Learning Specialty, Google Professional ML Engineer, Databricks ML Engineer Associate)

What we offer

• Base salary plus annual bonuses, within a competitive total rewards program
• Ownership of real AI deployments used by some of Canada's largest organizations
• Exposure to Azure, AWS and GCP in a single role
• A seat at client workshops and strategy discussions
• Ongoing learning and career development

Candidates apply through the online portal with a resume and cover letter; successful applicants are invited to a 30-45 minute vetting call before being presented to the client.