Data Science Lead

Employment Status: Full-time - Permanent
Location: Edmonton, Edmonton Research Park Facility

Work Model: Hybrid

About the Opportunity

The Data Science Lead is an opportunity to be part of a professional, purpose-driven team that values collaboration, innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement. Most importantly, your work will contribute to meaningful outcomes that make a difference for Albertans and help shape the future of our province.

Key responsibilities in the role of Data Science Lead include:

AI/ML Use-Case Delivery (End-to-End)

• Partner with business and program teams to identify, scope, and prioritize high-value use cases, translating business objectives into measurable ML/AI outcomes.
• Lead the full lifecycle - problem framing, data preparation, modelling, validation, and deployment - for the AI/ML use cases they lead, across classical ML and generative/LLM applications.
• Apply MLOps/LLMOps practices for their own solutions and partner with platform and engineering teams for production hardening, CI/CD, and monitoring.
• Measure and communicate the accuracy, business value, and risk of deployed solutions.

Generative & Agentic AI Development and Deployment

• Design, build, and deploy agentic AI solutions on Microsoft Copilot (e.g., Copilot Studio / Azure AI Foundry) and Anthropic Claude (Claude API / Claude Agent SDK), using tool/function calling and Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Implement closed-loop LLM systems - retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), evaluation loops, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop feedback - operated within controlled or private environments.
• Recommend standards for prompt design, retrieval quality, evaluation, and guardrails, and apply them to their solutions.
• Configure agent triggers, permissions, and human oversight consistent with standards set with Cybersecurity and Data Governance.

Model Development & Fine-Tuning on Internal Compute

• Train, fine-tune, and evaluate models - including open-weight LLMs - on internal / private compute where data residency or privacy requires it, using parameter-efficient methods (e.g., LoRA/QLoRA).
• Work with Infrastructure and Platform teams to provision and right-size the compute required, rather than owning the GPU environment.
• Follow the organization's data-classification policy and work with Data Governance on training-data access and de-identification.

AI Literacy & Enablement

• Contribute to organizational AI literacy through role-based enablement sessions, executive briefings, and a data-science community of practice, in partnership with People/HR and Learning & Development.
• Promote approved-tool boundaries and safe data-handling practices.
• Mentor analysts and technical staff and build shared tooling and reusable assets that raise data-science maturity.
• Represent the data-science perspective in cross-functional discussions.

Responsible AI & Continuous Improvement

• Apply responsible-AI practices (fairness, transparency, documentation, human oversight) and support algorithmic-impact assessments led by the governance and privacy function.
• Monitor emerging models, tools, and methods and recommend improvements.
• Provide technical input to evaluations of data science, ML, and AI tools and platforms.
• Collaborate with Data Governance, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Architecture, Privacy, and Infrastructure to keep solutions secure, compliant, and well-governed.

What You Need to Thrive in This Role

• Diploma in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline.
• 7 years of progressively responsible experience in data science, machine learning, or applied AI, including experience taking solutions into production.
• Demonstrated end-to-end delivery of AI/ML use cases (from discovery through production) with measurable business value required
• Demonstrated experience developing and deploying agentic AI using Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic Claude (including tool/function calling and MCP) required.
• Demonstrated experience i