Senior AI Researcher - Emerging Risks & Opportunities

MSCI • Toronto, ON

11d

About The Position

The Emerging Risks & Opportunities R&D team at MSCI is focused on building the next-generation capability for measuring and classifying portfolio exposure to economy-wide structural themes. This involves developing AI-native research methodologies and data pipelines to quantify company and portfolio exposure to emerging risks and opportunities such as AI disruption, climate change, geopolitics, and supply chain disruption. The work primarily involves researching public and private companies and generating investment signals from diverse data sources including earnings transcripts, company financial filings, and news. As a senior researcher, the role involves applying practical expertise in AI agent architecture and knowledge retrieval to solve complex investment research problems, contributing to the development of LLM-powered research workflows, and scaling these methodologies into investment signals for institutional investors covering both public and private companies.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building LLM systems for text analysis, information extraction, or document classification, and deep familiarity with knowledge retrieval (RAG) and AI agent architecture.
• Strong Python programming skills with experience in agentic orchestration and LLM application frameworks (e.g. LangGraph, LlamaIndex, or equivalent).
• Demonstrated ability to design prompts and decision rules that translate analytical frameworks into executable LLM pipelines.
• Experience applying AI-driven methodologies to investment research problems, including extracting insights from unstructured data and translating them into measurable, decision-useful signals.
• Track record of building evaluation methodologies for LLM-based systems, including techniques for measuring output quality and consistency at scale across multi-step agentic workflows.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and owning research workstreams end-to-end in a fast-paced environment with evolving priorities and iterative prototyping.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop research methodologies that enable institutional investors to quantify portfolio exposure to economy-wide structural themes, drawing on company financial filings, earnings transcripts, news and press releases, supply chain networks, patent filings, and hiring data in collaboration with investment research experts.
• Implement research methodologies using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic pipelines, ensuring transparency for institutional investors.
• Build evaluation pipelines for agentic systems, assess individual pipeline stages for output quality, and design regression tests across prompt and model changes to ensure methodological rigor at scale.
• Work closely with engineering teams to translate research prototypes into scalable, production-ready systems.
• Continuously research and prototype emerging techniques in agentic and reasoning architectures, and develop systematic approaches to codify research methodologies into reusable prompt and taxonomy configurations.

Benefits

• Transparent compensation schemes and comprehensive employee benefits, tailored to your location, ensuring your financial security, health, and overall wellbeing.
• Flexible working arrangements, advanced technology, and collaborative workspaces.
• A culture of high performance and innovation where we experiment with new ideas and take responsibility for achieving results.
• A global network of talented colleagues, who inspire, support, and share their expertise to innovate and deliver for our clients.
• Global Orientation program to kickstart your journey, followed by access to our Learning@MSCI platform, AI Learning Center , LinkedIn Learning Pro and tailored learning opportunities for ongoing skills development.
• Multi-directional career paths that offer professional growth and development through new challenges, internal mobility and expanded roles.
• We actively nurture an environment that builds a sense of inclusion belonging and connection, including eight Employee Resource Groups. All Abilities, Asian Support Network, Black Leadership Network, Climate Action Network, Hola! MSCI, Pride & Allies, Women in Tech, and Women’s Leadership Forum.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees