Job Description

Why join us?
Are you looking to join a dynamic pension plan that embodies the strong values of its 500,000 members and is an industry leading global investor? If so, we would love to tell you our story.

At OMERS we put our people first and are proud to embrace the diversity of thought and leadership that comes from having locations in Toronto, London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and other major cities across North America and Europe. Our culture is truly one of a kind. We get stuff done, and have fun doing it! We take great pride in contributing to the communities where we live with an ever-constant eye to the global investment markets.

The Senior Data Scientist will join the dynamic Enterprise Data & Advanced Analytics team within Data & Technology that applies data, analytics and AI to develop scalable business-first solutions for sustainable growth at OMERS. The Senior Enterprise Data Scientist will work alongside analytics specialists on their team and partner with data and analytics specialists within businesses and corporate functions to design, develop, implement and scale advanced solutions following best practices to drive measurable business outcomes.

Reporting to the Director of Enterprise Data Science, you will work closely with our Businesses, Corporate Functions, Enterprise Architecture, Business Relationship Management, Infrastructure and Enterprise Service Management, Cyber, Data Engineering, Data Governance and Analytics Strategy teams to deploy new capabilities following leading product management and AI system methodologies. You will develop and nurture strong relationships with partners in a variety of different business units across our global portfolio, building an understanding of their needs and how to apply data, analytics and AI techniques to increase scale and operational efficiency, enhance self-service capabilities and elevate the understanding & application of these capabilities across the company.

The Senior Data Scientist will partner with internal stakeholders and external partners to build out AI systems and deliver data analytics projects within set timelines. They meet objectives and focus on priorities which drive the successful operation of this Department and ensures alignment with OMERS business and technology strategy.

As a member of this team, you will be responsible for:

• Fostering strong relationships among cross-functional teams and facilitating decision making within multi-level audiences. Applying a system thinking approach to lead execution of data, analytics and AI initiatives quickly and in collaboration with other teams
• Driving the implementation of corporate/strategic objectives via AI/ML driven projects and seeing opportunities
• Leading ML projects from experiments and hands-on solutioning through to production
• Implementing model tracking, updating, and auto-train capabilities in addition to accounting for drift and imbalance
• Building and maintaining NLP models using state of the art techniques like transformers and seq2seq for the purposes of classification, sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and more
• Mentoring junior data scientists and the data science community at large and participating in continuous self-learning and mentorship
• Driving analytics innovation by posing open ended questions, exploring new ideas, recommending the appropriate techniques to solve challenging business problems and rapid prototyping
• Developing, deploying, and operationalizing data science products along with the supporting integrated tools and processes, including but not limited to security, performance, scalability, and extendibility
• Hands on creation and oversight of analytical models, conducting model training, validation, testing, integrated reconciliations and ongoing data and model integrity maintenance
• Providing guidance to the team by drawing on the understanding of business and technology objectives, available technology functionality, business impact and resource capacity
• Remaining on the "leading edge" of emerging data, analytics and AI technologies and techniques to identify and implement novel tools and techniques and their application to new use cases and deployment opportunities
• Driving a culture of innovation and AI by taking initiatives for activities such as lunch and learns, hackathons, paper readouts, etc.

To succeed in this role, you have:

• A undergraduate or graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, Mathematics or any other quantitative field
• Minimum eight (8) years' experience working in a data science/ Machine Learning environment

• Devops skills- Dockers, kubernetes, etc. is a strong asset

• A strong understanding of code deployment, monitoring, unit testing, scaling
• 3-5+ years of experience leading and delivering enterprise-scale data science/ML projects and facilitating collaboration across teams
• A proven grasp of the practical and theoretical aspects of statistical and deep learning such as data structures, algorithms, gradient descent, probability theory, linear algebra, calculus, hypothesis testing, and more
• Experience building scalable and automated ML pipelines with strong Python programming skills
• Natural language computing/understanding experience including but not limited to source data extraction, structuring, named entity extraction, sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and more
• Experience with framework such as TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, MxNet and the sci-kit learn library
• Proficiency with git is a must
• Experience implementing pre-built models at scale along with retraining and implementing a custom deep-learning architecture is a strong plus
• Experience working in the financial sector- ideally banks or investment firms, is an asset
• Experience within Pensions, Investments and Commercial Real Estate sectors are an asset
• Hands-on experience with big data systems such as Spark, Hadoop, Hive and ideally cloud technologies such as Azure Data Factory, AzureML, Azure Synapse, Google Fusion, Google BigQuery, AWS SageMaker, and others
• Experience in using external/alternative data, data modeling, data architecture, data engineering, insight generation, data visualization, feature engineering and AI systems development & optimization
• A passion around learning new technologies and analytical techniques with a track record of acting on this in prior roles and in their free time through projects, partnerships, mentoring and hackathons
• Demonstrated experience as a leader in creatively addressing unique or ambiguous situations and motivating teams and delivering multiple projects simultaneously serving multiple stakeholders
• The ability to build relationships and facilitate across a diverse group of stakeholders in several different business units
• Demonstrated experience applying product management, design thinking and human centered design
• Polished written and verbal communication and presentation skills targeted at all levels of the organization

Our story:

Founded in 1962, OMERS is one of Canada's largest defined benefit pension plans, with $121 billion in net assets as at December 31, 2021. OMERS is a jointly-sponsored pension plan, with 1,000 participating employers ranging from large cities to local agencies, and over half a million active, deferred and retired members. OMERS members include union and non-union employees of municipalities, school boards, local boards, transit systems, electrical utilities, emergency services and children's aid societies across Ontario. Contributions to the Plan are funded equally by members and employers. OMERS teams work in Toronto, London, New York, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Singapore, Sydney and other major cities across North America and Europe - serving members and employers and originating and managing a diversified portfolio of high-quality investments in public markets, private equity, infrastructure and real estate.

OMERS is committed to having a workforce that reflects the communities in which we live and work. We are an equal opportunity employer committed to a barrier-free recruitment and selection process. At OMERS inclusion and diversity means belonging. How we create a sense of belonging is through our employees and our vast network of Employee Resource Groups. Whether you are passionate about gender, pride, or visible minorities, we have groups that are focused on making a difference in all of our lives.

Vaccination Policy

At OMERS and Oxford the office or worksite is our primary place of work. We are committed to providing work environments which promote the health, safety and well-being of all employees in accordance with public health regulation and guidance. Accordingly, employees are required to provide evidence of full vaccination or have an approved exemption.