Staff MLOps Developer, Risk

Your career is an investment that grows over time
Wealthsimple is on a mission to help everyone achieve financial freedom by reimagining what it means to manage your money. Using smart technology, we take financial services that are often confusing, opaque and expensive and make them transparent and low-cost for everyone. We're the largest fintech company in Canada, with over 3+ million users who trust us with more than $100 billion in assets.
Our teams ship often and make an impact with groundbreaking ideas. We're looking for talented people who keep it simple and value collaboration and humility as we continue to create inclusive and high-performing teams where people can be inspired to do their best work.
About the team The quantitative risk team is responsible for the data and models that protect Wealthsimple and its customers from fraud, credit and market events. We are looking for a founding MLOps developer to lead the development of our AI/ML pipelines. This function plays a critical role in accelerating our adoption of AI, automating our training and tuning pipelines, and hardening our ML infrastructure against threats.   This individual will leverage a deep understanding of ML operations, engineering, and AI and the effective application of these tools in finance. They will apply this knowledge to enhance our end-to-end modeling infrastructure and help us deploy and maintain advanced models. This role offers the unique opportunity to work on high-impact projects that directly contribute to the security and efficiency of our platform. In this role, you will have the opportunity to:

• Automated Model Recalibration Pipeline: Implement and deploy an automated pipeline for model recalibration and re-fitting across key models, starting with those for fraud detection. Your work will ensure our models maintain optimal performance through systematic refreshing as market conditions evolve and threat actors' tactics change.
• Wealthsimple AI Foundation Model: Contribute to the continued development and productionization of our foundational AI model. This project requires both data science expertise and engineering rigour to transform how we understand our clients. You will apply advanced machine learning techniques while building scalable training pipelines and optimizing model performance. Your work will involve designing systems that effectively process diverse client signals (trades, transfers, clicks, purchases) into a unified high-dimensional embedding, then engineering these solutions from development to production. This versatile embedding will serve as the core intelligence layer for numerous downstream applications, including:
• Fraud Detection: classify signals associated with known fraud types.
• Client Segmentation: group clients based on their unique behaviours.
• Outlier Detection: identify abnormal behaviours and patterns beyond traditional fraud, enhancing our ability to maintain a secure and trustworthy platform.
• Model Explainability:  Drive model explainability (xAI) initiatives to ensure ML models meet regulatory requirements and can be successfully deployed to production environments. Develop and implement interpretability techniques that make complex models transparent to stakeholders, satisfying compliance standards while enabling faster model approval and deployment cycles.
• MLOps Security & Infrastructure Expertise: Lead the implementation of best practices in our machine learning operations to create a secure, scalable infrastructure. You will architect robust ML systems that protect against cybersecurity vulnerabilities including data poisoning, model evasion, and adversarial attacks, while ensuring our decision infrastructure remains performant and maintainable at scale.

What we are looking for:

• 5+ years of experience as a data scientist and/or machine learning engineer, with a focus on advanced models in finance.
• Expertise in Python, with a strong familiarity with key data science & machine learning libraries and tools. (PyTorch/TensorFlow/LightGBM/Scikit-Learn).
• Ownership of the design and development of an ML platform: demonstrated experience in productionalizing ML models, with a track record of owning the platform for ML model development, from prototyping to deployment and maintenance.
• Solid knowledge of data engineering and preprocessing, including handling large datasets, ensuring data quality, and managing data pipelines.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex ideas in a simple, clear, and engaging manner for a variety of audiences.
• Outstanding interpersonal skills, demonstrated through the ability to thrive in highly collaborative settings and contribute positively to team-oriented environments.
• Familiarity with key deep learning and LLM concepts such as tokenization, fine-tuning, sequence prediction, embedding.
• Experience optimizing the runtime of training or inference on GPUs including parallel training strategies, optimal batching, mixed precision.
• Familiarity with AI ethics and responsible AI practices, with a commitment to ensuring that our solutions are not only effective but also ethical and fair.
• Experience with relevant data platforms like kafka, snowflake, redshift.
• Experience with ML development platform and cloud environments like AWS and SageMaker.
• Experience with distributed systems, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and workflow orchestration (Airflow).
• Experience with CI/CD tools and working with Git.

Why Wealthsimple? Competitive salary with top-tier health benefits and life insurance Retirement savings matching plan using Wealthsimple for Business 20 vacation days per year and unlimited sick and mental health days Up to $1,500 per year towards wellness and professional development budgets respectively  90 days away program: Employees can work internationally in eligible countries for up to 90 days per calendar year  A wide variety of peer and company-led Employee Resource Groups (ie. Rainbow, Women of Wealthsimple, Black @ WS) Allocated number of Wellness Days that can be scheduled over the course of the year
We're a remote-first team, with over 1,000 employees coast to coast in North America. Be a part of our Canadian success story and help shape the financial future of millions — join us
Read our Culture Manual and learn more about how we work.
Technology & Innovation at Wealthsimple We believe the future belongs to those who innovate boldly. At Wealthsimple, every team member is expected to lean into new technologies, including AI, and tooling to rethink how we work, solve problems faster, and create even greater value. We're looking for people who are not just comfortable with change but energized by it. Our commitment is to build a company that evolves at the pace of the world around us, and we want you to help lead that future.
DEI Statement At Wealthsimple, we are building products for a diverse world and we need a diverse team to do that successfully. We strongly encourage applications from everyone regardless of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status. 
Accessibility Statement Wealthsimple provides an accessible candidate experience. If you need any accommodations or adjustments throughout the interview process and beyond, please let us know, and we will work with you to provide the necessary support and make reasonable accommodations to facilitate your participation. We are continuously working to improve our accessibility practices and welcome any feedback or suggestions on how we can better accommodate candidates with accessibility needs. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

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