Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Workiva Inc. • Toronto, ON

2d • Remote

About The Position

Workiva is building a next-generation AI platform for mission-critical workflows used by some of the world’s largest and most regulated organizations. We are seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to define how AI is architected, deployed, and trusted across our platform at enterprise scale, where accuracy, auditability, security, and reliability matter most.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including large-scale SaaS platforms.
• 5+ years designing, deploying, and operating production ML, AI, or data-intensive systems.
• Expert-level Python proficiency and proficiency in at least one production language such as Java, Go, Scala, or C++.

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing and operating enterprise AI platforms, including model serving, evaluation, observability, and governance.
• Deep expertise in RAG, agentic systems, and large-scale knowledge systems.
• Strong understanding of foundation model ecosystems, including inference, routing, prompting, and provider tradeoffs.
• Experience with AI evaluation, secure AI systems, and regulated enterprise environments.
• Proven track record leading architecture across multiple teams or platform domains.
• Strong distributed systems, cloud-native, API, reliability, and operational excellence experience.
• Proven record mentoring senior engineers and technical leaders.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of Workiva’s AI platform and core AI services.
• Shape how machine learning, Generative AI, and agentic systems are integrated across products.
• Lead the move from early adoption to production-grade, enterprise-ready systems.
• Define standards for model serving, retrieval, evaluation, governance, and platform reliability.
• Lead the design of enterprise agentic systems, including orchestration, workflow execution, memory, and multi-agent coordination.
• Design and evolve Retrieval-Augmented Generation capabilities for enterprise content and knowledge workflows.
• Establish evaluation methods and quality frameworks for Generative AI applications.
• Assess emerging AI technologies and guide adoption strategy for Workiva’s platform.
• Influence technical direction across teams, products, and platform domains.
• Mentor Staff and Senior Engineers and help raise the technical bar across the organization.
• Partner closely with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Architecture leaders.
• Align teams around a shared vision for scalable, secure AI at Workiva.
• Lead secure AI platform design, including authorization, runtime isolation, governance, auditability, and compliance.
• Establish best practices for AI safety, model governance, and customer data protection.
• Ensure AI systems meet enterprise expectations for availability, resiliency, observability, and operational support.
• Design for fault tolerance and operational excellence in regulated, security-conscious environments.

Benefits

• Workiva is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe that great minds think differently. We value diversity of backgrounds, beliefs, and interests, and we recognize diversity as an important source of intellectual thought, varied perspective, and innovation. Employment decisions are made without regard to age, gender identity, race, religion, disability status, sexual orientation, or any other protected characteristic. Workiva is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. To request assistance with the application process, please email [email protected]. Workiva employees are required to undergo comprehensive security and privacy training tailored to their roles, ensuring adherence to company policies and regulatory standards. Workiva supports employees in working where they work best - either from an office or remotely from any location within their country of employment.

What This Job Offers

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