Principal Engineer, AI

Make an impact at a global and dynamic investment organization

When you join CPP Investments, you are joining one of the world's most admired and respected institutional investors. As a professional investment management organization, CPP Investments invests the funds of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) to help ensure its financial sustainability for generations of working and retired Canadians.

CPP Investments invests across regions and asset classes to build a globally diversified portfolio. It holds assets in public equity, private equity, real estate, infrastructure, and fixed income, and the CPP Fund is projected to reach $3.6 trillion in assets by 2050. The organization is headquartered in Toronto with offices in Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, New York City, San Francisco, São Paulo, and Sydney.

CPP Investments successfully attracts, selects, and retains talented individuals from top-tier institutions worldwide. Join our team for access to:

• Stimulating work in a fast-paced and intellectually challenging environment
• Accelerated exposure and responsibility
• Global career development opportunities
• Diverse and inspiring colleagues and approachable leaders
• A hybrid-flexible work environment with an emphasis on in-person collaboration
• A culture rooted in principles of integrity, partnership, and high performance
• An organization with an important social purpose that positively impacts lives

If you have a passion for performance, value a collegial and collaborative culture, and approach work with the highest integrity, invest your career here.

As a Principal Engineer for AI & Emerging Tech, you will lead the design, development, and deployment of scalable AI solutions and products that support CPP Investments' enterprise-wide goals. This role combines deep technical expertise with strategic leadership, requiring strong collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders, guidance of technical teams, and a forward-looking mindset to evaluate and integrate emerging technologies.

You will play a key role in ensuring technical excellence, responsible AI adoption, and operational readiness of GenAI solutions—spanning experimentation, piloting, and full-scale deployment.

As a Principal Engineer, you will help develop and lead the strategic direction and execution of technology and data initiatives within the organization. While ensuring strong collaboration and partnership with your business aligned product owner, you will have the end-to-end accountability for the development and implementation of innovative technological solutions and data-driven strategies to drive business growth and efficiency.

Core Accountabilities:

• Lead end-to-end technical architecture, planning and execution of complex AI solutions, pilots and projects.
• Produce high-level solution architectures aligned with emerging technologies, enterprise capabilities and business outcomes.
• Drive strategic technical decisions to ensure scalability, performance, and security of AI models and systems.
• Mentor and develop engineers, fostering best practices in software and AI development.
• Improve engineering maturity by introducing shared patterns, practices, and reusable components. Conduct risk assessments and implement mitigation strategies throughout solution lifecycles.
• Champion responsible AI practices by addressing bias, fairness, explainability, and regulatory compliance.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies including AI/ frameworks, retrieval augmentation, and cloud-native deployments.
• Lead technical communications with senior stakeholders and ensure transparency in decision-making.
• Actively participate in project reviews, identifying improvement opportunities in architecture, delivery, and process.Align technical initiatives with broader organizational goals through collaboration with Data Science, Cybersecurity, Product, and Operations teams.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field; advanced degrees or certifications are an asset.
• 8 years of progressive experience in engineering roles, including at least 2–3 years leading AI and/or emerging tech initiatives.
• Experience in:
  • Gen AI models (GPT-4o, Claude, LLaMA) and prompt engineering techniques
  • Agentic AI, MCP, Graph/RAG architectures
  • Gen AI Framework (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Amazon Bedrock)
  • Web application development using , React, TypeScript/JavaScript
  • AWS cloud services (EKS, Fargate, Lambda, Athena, Glue, Lake Formation)
  • Infrastructure as Code (Puppet, Terraform, Docker) and containerized deployments
  • ETL orchestration using Apache Airflow/DAGs
  • Vector/Graph databases (Weaviate, Milvus, PGVector, Neo4J, Neptune) and query optimization
  • Python programming (NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Boto3)
  • Automated testing frameworks (Ragas, Playwright, Zephyr, Selenium)
  • Familiarity with SDLC best practices, DevSecOps, Agile Scrum/Kanban, and work management tools (JIRA, Confluence, JIRA Align).
• Knowledge of LLM fine tuning techniques
• Experience in BI tools like QuickSight, Tableau
• Knowledge of financial markets

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At CPP Investments, we are committed to diversity and equitable access to employment opportunities based on ability.

We thank all applicants for their interest but will only contact candidates selected to advance in the hiring process.

Our Commitment to Inclusion and Diversity:

In addition to being dedicated to building a workforce that reflects diverse talent, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and accessible experience. If you require an accommodation for any part of the recruitment process (including alternate formats of materials, accessible meeting rooms, etc.), please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.

Disclaimer:

CPP Investments does not accept resumes from employment placement agencies, head-hunters or recruitment suppliers that are not in a formal contractual arrangement with us. Our recruitment supplier arrangements are restricted to specific hiring needs and do not include this or other web-site job postings. Any resume or other information received from a supplier not approved by CPP Investments to provide resumes to this posting or web-site will be considered unsolicited and will not be considered. CPP Investments will not pay any referral, placement or other fee for the supply of such unsolicited resumes or information.