Manulife is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer

Manulife is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join our Global Retirement & Wealth AI team. In this role, you will build and scale production-grade Generative AI solutions to improve participant outcomes, advisor productivity, and operational efficiency. You will power experiences such as copilots, RAG over documents, personalization, and workflow automation.

What You'll Do

• Design, implement, and productionize LLM-powered applications (APIs, microservices, UI-backed services) including RAG pipelines, tool/Function-calling, and agentic workflows.
• Partner with data engineers to source, model, and optimize structured and unstructured data. Implement embedding pipelines, chunking strategies, and vector search.
• Apply classical ML and GenAI techniques (prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG, reranking, guardrails) to improve accuracy, latency, cost, and hallucination control.
• Ship reliable services with CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, model/prompt versioning, MLflow/experiment tracking, observability, and automated evaluation suites.
• Implement and document controls for PII/financial data, RBAC, prompt injection defenses, content filtering, and model risk governance.
• Translate business goals into technical plans with Product, Operations, Compliance, Risk, and Legal teams. Convert requirements into robust builds and SLAs.
• Stay current on LLM and retrieval research, model choices, evaluation techniques, and platform capabilities and pragmatically apply them to use cases at scale.

What We're Looking For

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.
• 4+ years building ML/AI solutions, including 2+ years hands-on with Generative AI (RAG, prompt engineering, function/tool calling, agentic patterns).
• Strong Python and SQL; experience with LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, or ADK; familiarity with Hugging Face, PyTorch, and modern embedding/reranker stacks.
• Practical experience on Azure (preferred) and Databricks/Spark, Delta Lake/Unity Catalog, feature stores, API development, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and event/messaging.
• Hands-on with embedding models, chunking, metadata enrichment, vector databases/search, hybrid search and retrieval evaluation/telemetry.
• CI/CD (e.g., GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps), model and timely lifecycle management, experiment tracking (MLflow), observability, evaluation harnesses, and optimization of expenses and response times.
• Excellent ability to translate complex ML/LLM concepts into business outcomes for both technical and non-technical partners; clear documentation and design articulation.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to model risk management, prompt and content safety guardrails, adversarial testing/red-teaming, and responsible AI practices.
• Practical experience with LoRA/PEFT, supervised fine-tuning, or instruction-tuning pipelines; evaluation with task-specific metrics and human-in-the-loop review.
• Familiarity with Azure OpenAI, Databricks (including Unity Catalog), API design, microservices, and serverless patterns.
• Experience running online experiments (A/B, interleaving), prompt/model eval frameworks, quality dashboards, and cost/latency SLOs.
• Comfortable building POCs/demos across backend services and lightweight frontends to accelerate partner feedback.

Technical Stack

• Languages & Frameworks: Python, SQL, LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, ADK, Hugging Face, PyTorch
• Cloud & Data Platforms: Azure, Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog
• Infrastructure & Tools: Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, Event Hubs
• Databases & Search: Azure AI Search, Redis, MongoDB, LanceDB
• MLOps & CI/CD: MLflow, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps

Team & Environment

You will be part of the Global Retirement & Wealth AI team.

Benefits & Compensation

• Compensation Range: $94,430.00 CAD - $144,430.00 CAD
• Health, dental, mental health, vision insurance
• Short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance
• Adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits
• Employee/family assistance plans
• Retirement savings plans (including pension)
• Global share ownership plan with employer matching
• Financial education and counseling resources
• Generous paid time off program including holidays, vacation, personal, and sick days

Work Mode

This is a hybrid position based in Toronto, Ontario.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.