Senior Staff Applied Scientist (AI)

Location: Ottawa and Toronto, Canada — hybrid; other Canadian locations — remote.

Company

hirify.global develops an AI-infused supply chain orchestration platform used by enterprise customers worldwide to improve forecasting, visibility, and decision-making.

What you will do

• Set the forecasting science agenda, define the research roadmap, and translate business goals into ML problems, measurable success criteria, and technical priorities.
• Provide technical direction, mentor senior scientists and ML engineers, review designs, and strengthen scientific judgment across teams.
• Guide classical time-series, machine-learning, probabilistic, pretrained, hierarchical, intermittent-demand, covariate, cold-start, segmentation, explainability, and domain-adaptation work.
• Define accuracy metrics, benchmarks, quality gates, backtesting standards, and reproducible experiment-to-validation practices.
• Shape architecture with architects, MLOps, platform, and data-infrastructure teams for millions of series and daily forecasting.
• Communicate scientific trade-offs to technical and executive audiences and align accuracy, scalability, cost, operational simplicity, and commercial priorities.

Requirements

• Deep hands-on expertise in time-series or demand forecasting, including classical statistical methods, modern ML approaches, and deep-learning or foundation-model methods.
• Strong knowledge of backtesting, hierarchical and intermittent demand, covariates, forecast evaluation, probabilistic and quantile forecasting, calibration, and uncertainty.
• Master’s degree in computer science, statistics, operations research, or a related quantitative field; a Ph.D. is preferred.
• 8+ years of experience developing, testing, debugging, and optimizing complex ML solutions in Python, with strong software-engineering practices.
• Experience moving research and proofs of concept into maintainable production systems with measurable impact.
• Proficiency with distributed data tooling such as Spark, cloud platforms such as GCP or Azure, containers, and distributed computing.
• Practical experience with model explainability, reproducibility, evaluation standards, and ML quality gates.
• Ability to shape technical direction across multiple teams, influence roadmap and investment decisions, mentor others, and remain hands-on.
• Strong written and verbal communication, including alignment of technical teams and executive stakeholders around a scientific strategy.

Nice to have

• Publications, patents, open-source contributions, industry benchmarks, or production systems with demonstrated impact.
• Experience with pretrained time-series models such as Chronos, TabPFN-TS, or TimesFM, and LLM-assisted configuration or analytics tooling.
• Supply chain or manufacturing knowledge, including demand planning, S&OP, replenishment, or optimization, and experience forecasting hundreds of thousands to millions of series.
• Experience productizing data-science capabilities for non-experts and building automated configuration, calibration, or accuracy assistants.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work options, with hybrid work in Ottawa and Toronto and remote work from other Canadian locations.
• Flexible vacation and company-wide hirify.global Days.
• Physical and mental well-being programs, including virtual fitness classes.
• Mentorship, training, career development, recognition programs, referral rewards, and hackathons.
• Inclusive workplace with accessibility accommodations and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.