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.

We’re hiring two 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: 

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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:

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• 0–3 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:

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• 0–3 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.

When you join our team:

• We’ll empower you to learn and grow the career you want. 
• We’ll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words. 
• As part of our global team, we’ll 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 https://www.manulife.com/en/about/our-story.html.

Manulife 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 hr@manulife.com.

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 hr@manulife.com 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 hr@manulife.com for more information about U.S.-specific paid time off provisions.

We use data and analytics technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and automated processing tools, to analyze and process the information you provide to us or third parties in the application process. For more information, please refer to our personal information collection statement.