Senior Applied AI Engineer
City : Montreal
Category : Alpha Science
Industry : Financial Services
Employer : PSP Investments
ABOUT US
We’re one of Canada’s largest pension investors, with CAD$320.6 billion of net assets as of March 31, 2026.
We invest funds for the pension plans of the federal public service, the Canadian Forces, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Reserve Force. Headquartered in Ottawa, PSP Investments has its principal business office in Montréal and offices in New York, London and Hong Kong.
Capturing and leading complex global investments requires us to work as one to seize valuable opportunities, in close collaboration with some of the world’s top companies. At PSP Investments, you’ll join a team of motivated and engaged professionals, dedicated to propelling our organization further than ever before.
ABOUT YOUR ROLE
Floyd is PSP's in-house AI platform — a custom analyst built for our investment teams. It pairs a conversational assistant with purpose-built workflows that turn complex research questions into structured, decision-ready output. Under the hood, Floyd is an agentic system that orchestrates the latest frontier models through the OpenAI, Google (Gemini) and Anthropic (Claude) APIs, routing each task to the right model and breaking big problems into smaller ones it can work through in parallel. It's already changing how investment professionals work day-to-day — and it's still early, with a lot left to build.
This role puts you at the frontier of applied AI inside an institutional investor. It's hands-on and high-agency, blending AI engineering with real product sense and close partnership with the people who use what you build. You'll own problems end to end — from a vague request on the investment floor to a reliable capability running in production — with the autonomy to decide how to get there.
You will have the chance to shape a flagship AI platform at one of Canada's largest pension investment managers, with direct impact on how investment decisions are researched, with access to frontier models and proprietary data at scale, within a high-caliber, collaborative team.
As a Senior Applied AI Engineer, you’ll:
Design and build the core of Floyd's agentic system: prompting, tool use, retrieval across unstructured and structured data, multi-model orchestration and evaluation
Collaborate with our Data Engineers to build the ML and AI-serving pipelines behind Floyd on Databricks — our primary platform for data engineering, data science and AI serving
Develop across the stack: the Floyd Python SDK and its Gradio- and React-based front ends
Keep Floyd production-grade — reliability, latency, cost and monitoring — within the security and data-governance standards of a financial institution
Lean on AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex) to move fast from prototype to production and help the team get more out of them
Advise/Partner closely with investment professionals to build trust, drive adoption, and feed what you learn back into the product
WHAT YOU’LL NEED
We're looking for a senior engineer who has shipped real AI products and likes working close to the people who use them.
Five (5) years or more building and shipping production software and/or ML systems, ideally in hands-on, user-facing roles
Production experience building and deploying LLM applications at scale
Hands-on experience with agent frameworks, vector databases, model fine-tuning, and LLM observability and evaluation tooling
Expert in Python (mandatory) and strong in JavaScript/TypeScript — comfortable building both a Python SDK and a Gradio or React front end
Hands-on experience with Databricks for data engineering, data science and/or model serving.
Comfortable across cloud platforms — we run primarily on Azure (Databricks, AKS) and Google Cloud (Vertex AI)
Expert user of AI coding agents such as Claude Code and/or Codex
High agency and sound judgment in ambiguous, fast-moving environments, with a strong collaborative mindset
Excellent communication — you can translate between domain experts and engineers and explain complex ideas simply
Experience with tabular data and time-series manipulation, an asset
Traditional (classical) ML experience beyond LLMs, an asset
Experience in financial services, asset management or capital markets, or with investment-research workflows, an asset
MLOps and platform experience (CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes/AKS) , an asset
Bilingualism: English and French (frequent interactions in English with PSP employees based in our offices in Hong Kong, London and New York, and interactions in French with employees in our local offices in Montreal and Ottawa)
We offer a tailored employee experience and competitive total rewards and benefits package* designed to attract and retain global diverse talent, reward performance, and reinforce business strategies and priorities. Beyond salary and incentive pay eligibility, you have access to:
Investment in career development
Comprehensive group insurance plans
Competitive pension plans
Unlimited access to virtual healthcare services and wellness programs
Gender-inclusive paid family leave policy: up to 26 weeks for primary caregivers, 5 weeks for secondary caregivers
A personalized family-building support, from pre-pregnancy to menopause, with available financial assistance
Vacation days available on day one with additional days on milestone service anniversaries, and summer Friday afternoons off
A hybrid work model with a mix of in-office and remote days
*Benefits package may vary based on your employee type.
At PSP Investments, we aim to provide a workplace where everyone feels valued, safe, respected and empowered to grow. As part of this leadership commitment, we strongly encourage applications from all qualified applicants and strive to offer an inclusive and accessible candidate experience. If you require any accommodation for any part of the recruitment process, please let us know.
Visit us on www.investpsp.com/en/
Follow us on LinkedIn
#LI-GR1