Associate Applied AI Engineer – GenAI Systems

Manulife is making a significant investment in Advanced Analytics and GenAI to transform how Finance Treasury and Actuarial teams make decisions. Our AI team builds practical governed solutions that move from idea to implementation and are adopted in real business workflows.

Were hiring an Associate Applied AI Engineers who bring strong technical depth sound software engineering practices and a modern GenAI design mindset to help deliver AI and GenAI capabilities that integrate effectively into real business workflows. This is an excellent opportunity for candidates with graduate-level training in AI/ML or related quantitative disciplines as well as those in early-career applied AI roles who want to work on meaningful business problems rather than research prototypes or notebook-based analysis alone. If you enjoy taking ambiguous business challenges and translating them into structured solution designs measurable experiments and production-ready outcomes this role is for you.

Position Responsibilities:

Contribute to end-to-end solution design (GenAI ML)

• Translate business problems into a clear solution approach including user workflow data flow model approach evaluation plan and operational controls.
• Create lightweight high-quality design artifacts such as system context runtime sequence agent/tool maps data lineage and decision logs that support implementation and governance.
• Participate in design discussions and make thoughtful trade-offs across accuracy explainability cost latency and maintainability.

Build models and GenAI components for Finance & Actuarial use cases

• Develop ML solutions such as forecasting classification NLP anomaly detection optimization and scenario analysis.
• Build GenAI capabilities such as retrieval-based solutions (RAG) structured summarization and extraction transaction understanding variance explanation and tool-using workflows where appropriate.
• Engineer features from structured and unstructured data and help ensure solutions remain robust as data evolves.

Apply strong evaluation and testing practices

• Implement performance evaluation using holdouts backtesting error analysis and fit-for-purpose metrics aligned to the business problem.
• For GenAI help design practical evaluation approaches such as scenario coverage edge cases human review rubrics quality scoring and regression testing.
• Document model limitations clearly and support guardrails that improve the reliability and safe use of outputs.

Partner closely to productionize and operate solutions

• Collaborate with Data Engineering ML Engineering and Software teams to productionize solutions through reliable data pipelines model packaging CI/CD deployment and monitoring.
• Write maintainable tested code using strong software engineering practices such as version control modular design logging and code review.
• Support monitoring for data quality drift performance deterioration and operational failures and help investigate issues when thresholds are breached.
• Contribute to runbooks and support adoption and UAT with business users.

Work in a governed environment

• Contribute to the documentation and evidence required for model risk review including assumptions validation results monitoring plans UAT evidence and approvals.
• Ensure privacy and security expectations are met through data minimization appropriate access controls and safe handling of sensitive information.
• Follow established standards for reproducibility traceability model documentation and auditability.

Grow team capability and delivery maturity

• Learn quickly from design reviews code reviews and stakeholder feedback and apply those lessons to future work.
• Contribute reusable components templates examples and testing patterns that make team delivery faster and more consistent.
• Stay current with emerging AI and GenAI engineering patterns and bring forward practical ideas that improve how the team builds solutions.

Required Qualifications:

• Masters or PhD in Computer Science Statistics Machine Learning Applied Mathematics Operations Research Engineering or a related quantitative field.
• 03 years of experience in applied data science / machine learning including internships co-ops research or early-career industry experience; strong academic project work may also be considered.
• Strong Python and SQL with solid software engineering fundamentals such as Git-based workflows code reviews unit and integration testing logging readable code structure debugging and basic performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience with modern DS/ML tooling such as scikit-learn PyTorch/TensorFlow Spark/Databricks or similar including data preparation feature engineering and model development.
• Demonstrated ability to turn a problem into a structured technical approach including clear thinking around inputs outputs assumptions failure modes and evaluation.
• Exposure to building or evaluating GenAI solutions including at least one of: RAG structured summarization/extraction LLM-based classification tool/function calling or multi-step workflows.
• Strong evaluation mindset across ML and GenAI including metric selection holdout testing error analysis scenario coverage edge-case thinking and basic regression testing approaches.
• Understanding of production-oriented development including packaging code working with APIs or services handling configuration monitoring outputs and designing for maintainability.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical outputs limitations and design choices in plain language.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Graduate-level training with applied research or project experience in AI/ML demonstrated through thesis work capstone projects publications internships co-ops open-source contributions or industry collaboration.
• Hands-on GenAI experience across multiple patterns such as RAG prompt orchestration structured outputs tool/function calling and agentic workflows.
• Familiarity with GenAI system components such as vector databases embeddings semantic search reranking orchestration frameworks and prompt/version management.
• Experience with cloud-based data and ML environments such as Azure Databricks MLflow model registries CI/CD pipelines and API deployment patterns.
• Experience building software beyond notebooks including libraries services reusable modules or internal tools used by others.
• Familiarity with evaluation frameworks for GenAI including test sets rubric-based review regression packs and quality monitoring.
• Exposure to Finance Treasury Insurance IFRS-17 or Actuarial use cases and/or familiarity with model governance practices such as documentation validation evidence and monitoring plans.
• Experience implementing practical GenAI guardrails such as hallucination reduction grounding strategies safe output formatting access controls and human review workflows.
• Evidence of technical initiative through publications open-source contributions hackathons strong capstone projects or applied research with real-world impact.

When you join our team:

• Well empower you to learn and grow the career you want.
• Well recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.
• As part of our global team well support you in shaping the future you want to see.

#LI-Hybrid

The role being advertised is an existing vacancy.

About Manulife and John Hancock

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider helping people make their decisions easier and lives better. To learn more about us visit is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock we embrace our diversity. 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 and we administer all of our practices and programs 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.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process. All information shared during the accommodation request process will be stored and used in a manner that is consistent with applicable laws and Manulife/John Hancock policies. To request a reasonable accommodation in the application process contact .

Referenced Salary Location

Salary range is expected to be between

Employees also have the opportunity to participate in incentive programs and earn incentive compensation tied to business and individual performance. The actual salary will vary depending on local market conditions geography and relevant job-related factors such as knowledge skills qualifications experience and education/training. If you are applying for this role outside of the primary location please contact for the salary range for your location.

Manulife offers eligible employees a wide array of customizable benefits including health dental mental health vision short- and long-term disability life and AD&D insurance coverage adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits and employee/family assistance plans. We also offer eligible employees various retirement savings plans (including pension and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources. Our generous paid time off program in Canada includes holidays vacation personal and sick days and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence. If you are applying for this role in the U.S. please contact for more information about U.S.-specific paid time off provisions.

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