Director, AI

Location: Toronto

The Director, Artificial Intelligence will lead an AI team supporting the Long Term Care (LTC) program in John Hancock and Manulife. This role is accountable for building and scaling AI solutions that improve business processes, generate strategic insights, and enable measurable impact across the organization. This is a leadership role that requires a strong combination of technical depth, business judgment, people leadership, and delivery excellence.

The Director will manage a team of AI Engineers, Data Scientists, and technical professionals responsible for designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining production-grade AI and machine learning solutions. The ideal candidate is passionate about AI, a continuous learner, and someone who actively follows the latest trends in AI, GenAI, LLMs, machine learning, data science, software engineering, and cloud technologies. The candidate should have strong hands-on experience as an individual contributor in AI or data science and be able to guide teams through complex technical decisions.

This includes experience across both traditional predictive analytics, machine learning, and MLOps as well as newer areas such as GenAI, LLMs, RAG, prompt orchestration, guardrails, LLMOps. The Director will work closely with business, technology, risk, compliance, operations, and executive stakeholders to identify opportunities, shape strategy, deliver high-quality AI solutions, and communicate impact in clear business terms.

Position Responsibilities:

Lead the development and delivery of AI, ML, and GenAI solutions that support the Long Term Care business strategy in John Hancock and Manulife. Manage and develop a team of AI Engineers, Data Scientists, and technical professionals, providing coaching, technical guidance, performance management, and career development. Own complex AI initiatives from business problem definition through solution design, model development, engineering, deployment, adoption, and value measurement.

Partner with business leaders and stakeholders to identify high-value AI opportunities, translate business needs into technical solutions, and ensure AI products deliver measurable outcomes. Provide technical leadership across traditional data science, predictive modeling, machine learning, GenAI, LLMs, and production AI engineering. Guide the team in building modular, scalable, reusable AI and GenAI pipelines, including model development, feature engineering, model registries, automated retraining, and production deployment practices.

Oversee the deployment of production-grade AI services using modern cloud, MLOps, Dev Ops, and software engineering practices, including containerization, CI/CD, monitoring, observability, and model governance.  Ensure AI solutions are reliable, secure, scalable, cost-effective, well-documented, and aligned with enterprise architecture, security, risk, and compliance standards. Lead the evaluation and adoption of GenAI patterns and tools, including LLMs, RAG, vector search, prompt engineering, guardrails, Azure OpenAI, Databricks, and internal AI platforms.  

Drive strong engineering and model management practices, including testing, monitoring, model performance tracking, drift detection, challenger testing, and continuous improvement.  Communicate AI strategy, delivery progress, risks, business value, and model impact to senior leaders and cross-functional partners in a clear and practical way. Build strong partnerships across business, technology, data, security, risk, compliance, and operations teams to support adoption and long-term success.

Stay current with advances in AI, GenAI, data science, engineering, cloud platforms, and emerging technology, and bring practical innovation into the…