Vanguard
Head of Applied AI Research & Development
Toronto, Canada
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 6 hours ago
Machine LearningTensorFlowPyTorchLLMsAgentic AIAI OrchestrationStatisticsA/B TestingProduct StrategyElectrical EngineeringResearchLeadershipCommunicationCollaborationMentoring
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About the role
- The Head of Applied AI Research & Development serves as the strategic leader responsible for operationalizing advanced AI research into enterprise-ready capabilities.
- This leader oversees multidisciplinary teams of applied AI/ML researchers, machine learning engineers, and AI platform specialists focused on delivering scalable AI solutions that directly impact Vanguard's products, operations, and client experience.
- The role combines technical leadership, product strategy, and organizational influence to accelerate AI adoption across the enterprise.
Responsibilities
- Drive innovation across frontier AI domains, including foundation models, Large World Models (LWMs), world modeling systems, agentic AI, enterprise reasoning, cognitive AI architectures, and next-generation intelligent systems.
- Partner with business, product, engineering, and external research organizations to accelerate adoption of AI capabilities, proof of concepts, build strategic partnerships, and translate emerging research into measurable business value.
- Build and develop a world-class Applied AI organization by recruiting, mentoring, and growing high-performing talent while fostering a culture of technical excellence, experimentation, innovation, and responsible AI development.
Requirements
- Proven experience delivering applied AI capabilities which are repeatable across research or industry settings
- Experience designing AI systems capable of contextual understanding, sequential reasoning, adaptive decision-making, memory-aware architectures, or complex workflow orchestration
- Strong understanding of modern AI development lifecycles including experimentation, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement
- Hands-on expertise with modern ML frameworks including PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, distributed training, and cloud AI platforms
- PhD or Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Cognitive Science, Management Science or a related discipline.
- 7+ years of experience leading Applied AI, Machine Learning, AI Engineering, or AI Platform teams within industry or research environments.
- Deep expertise in large language models, foundation models, agentic AI, machine learning systems, reinforcement learning, retrieval systems, reasoning architectures, knowledge representation, or advanced AI applications.
- Experience building enterprise AI solutions, model governance processes, evaluation frameworks, and scalable ML models
- Demonstrated ability to lead large, multidisciplinary AI initiatives spanning research, academic, business organizations across both industry or research environments
- Exceptional executive communication skills with experience influencing senior leadership and enterprise strategy
- How We Work
- Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.
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This listing is sourced directly from Vanguard's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.