Lead Generative AI Engineer

Vancity • Vancouver, BC

65d • Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Lead Gen AI Engineer to join our GenAI & Cognitive AI Pod, focused on building production ready Generative AI & Agentic AI solutions that support cognitive reasoning, automation, and decisioning.

This role is highly hands-on and best suited for a software engineer who understands AI deeply enough to build, deploy, and operate GenAI systems at scale. You will work closely with GenAI leadership, AI engineers, ML engineers, and RPA teams to design and deliver LLM based workflows, agentic pipelines, and GenAI APIs.

This is a highly hands on engineering role; success is measured by production ready GenAI systems, not slideware or experimentation alone.

This is a
Full-time, Permanent role based at our Head Office, in Vancouver, British Columbia, and reporting to, Director of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Centre of Excellence.

Our head office is based in Vancouver, but we are open to candidates in BC and Ontario. While this position is for an existing vacancy and provides a hybrid work arrangement, you will be expected to be on-site for events and business demands when needed.

Requirements

• 4–7 years of experience in software engineering, AI engineering, or ML adjacent engineering roles
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong hands on experience building and deploying cloud based services, with fluency in cloud (preferably Azure)
• Practical experience working with Generative AI and LLM concepts, including RAG and agentic workflows
• Proven ability to take solutions from prototype to production
• Excellent Python and SQL skills (production quality code, data pipelines, APIs)
• Strong understanding of: LLM workflows and orchestration Prompt engineering and retrieval strategies API design and service integration CI/CD concepts and cloud deployment patterns
• Experience with agent frameworks or tool calling architectures

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Azure AI services (e.g., Azure OpenAI, Azure ML concepts)
• Experience with Databricks for data processing, ML, or GenAI workflows
• Familiarity with document intelligence, OCR, NLP, or communication mining
• Exposure to MLOps / GenAIOps concepts (model lifecycle, monitoring, evaluation)
• Experience integrating AI services into RPA or automation platforms (i.e. UI Path, Power Automate)
• Familiarity with other cloud ecosystems (AWS or GCP)

Responsibilities

• Building end to end LLM workflows, from data ingestion and retrieval through inference and response orchestration
• Designing and implementing agentic AI pipelines that support decisioning, verification, and cognitive automation
• Developing GenAI use cases including: - Documenting intelligence and verification - Communication mining and NLP - Knowledge retrieval and reasoning (RAG) - Agent based decision orchestration
• Tune and optimize LLM usage (prompting strategies, embeddings, retrieval quality, latency, and cost)
• Design and implement Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, including indexing, chunking, embeddings, and retrieval strategies
• Apply classic ML and NLP techniques where appropriate to improve accuracy, classification, extraction, or ranking
• Collaborate with Data Science and ML Engineering partners to integrate predictive models into GenAI workflows
• Build and deploy GenAI solutions on cloud (i.e. Azure and Databricks), following cloud native best practices
• Implement API services to expose GenAI capabilities for downstream consumers (including RPA and business applications)
• Contribute to CI/CD and deployment pipelines for GenAI workloads, including environment management and release practices
• Partner with platform and cloud teams to ensure solutions are scalable, secure, and production ready
• Integrate GenAI services with RPA workflows (UiPath) and existing ML pipelines
• Work closely with: - GenAI & Agentic AI Lead - AI Engineers and Full Stack AI Developers - Cognitive UX / Prompt Engineers
• Participating in agile delivery rituals (stand-ups, planning, demos) and contribute to shared engineering standards

Benefits

• Living Wage Employer: We’re the largest private sector Living Wage Employer in Canada and consistently ranked among Canada’s Top Employers.
• Customizable Benefits: Permanent employees receive flexible benefit packages that can be tailored annually to meet evolving needs.
• Generous Vacation: New employees start with 3-4 weeks of vacation per year, with additional days earned overtime.
• Extra Stat Holidays: In addition to BC’s 11 statutory holidays, we offer 2 extra days, plus care days for personal or family illness.
• Immediate Health Coverage: Health and dental benefits begin on your hire date, with three levels of coverage to choose from.
• Defined Benefit Pension: Our retirement plan provides a guaranteed income for life, recognizing that retirement looks different for everyone.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level