Senior Data Scientist | Scientifique de données senior

Company Overview
Jesta I.S. is a Canadian enterprise software company with over 55 years of experience delivering mission-critical solutions to retailers, wholesalers, and brand manufacturers worldwide. Our Vision Suite platform supports complex retail operations across merchandising, supply chain, inventory, commerce, and financial management for fashion, footwear, athletic, luxury, and specialty retail. As part of our strategic investment in AI, Jesta is building a new generation of intelligent enterprise applications combining predictive analytics, machine learning, generative AI, agentic AI, and computer vision within business workflows. Our AI Centre of Excellence develops production-grade AI solutions deployed against real client data at scale.
Position Summary
We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist with deep expertise across modern AI from predictive modelling to large language models, agentic AI systems, and computer vision. This senior individual contributor role requires strong autonomous judgment, technical leadership, and the ability to define and execute complex AI workstreams with minimal supervision. The successful candidate will take full ownership of our production AI stack maintaining, improving, and scaling models and pipelines already in active client use while contributing to new capabilities. You will work at the intersection of predictive modelling, generative AI, and enterprise software, with your work deployed against real client data at scale.
Key Responsibilities
Predictive Modelling & Demand Forecasting
Design, develop, and optimize ML models for demand forecasting, inventory optimization, and pricing analytics.
Perform EDA, model diagnostics, and data quality assessments.
Engineer advanced features including promotions, seasonality, holidays, stockouts, lag variables, external signals, and signal processing.
Design and execute model experiments, hypothesis testing, oracle testing, and statistical evaluations.
Evaluate and benchmark forecasting approaches (LightGBM, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, PyTorch, DeepAR, ARIMA/SARIMA, Prophet, ensemble methods, Croston/TSB).
Own the full model lifecycle from development and backtesting to deployment, monitoring, drift detection, and retraining.
Large Language Models & Generative AI
Design and implement LLM-powered applications using RAG, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, structured outputs, and vector databases.
Build AI systems that securely interact with enterprise data through governed APIs.
Evaluate and integrate commercial and open-source foundation models into production.
Develop explainability and transparency mechanisms for enterprise AI.
Agentic AI Systems & MCP
Design and develop autonomous AI agents with multi-step reasoning and tool use.
Build integrations using Model Context Protocol (MCP) and tool-calling architectures for ERP data access.
Implement human-in-the-loop (HITL) workflows, role-based security, and approval mechanisms.
Establish standards for reliability, traceability, and auditability of agentic systems.
APIs & Production AI Infrastructure
Design Semantic Read APIs connecting AI models to ERP data securely.
Build scalable batch inference and feature pipelines on AWS SageMaker and Azure ML.
Contribute to CI/CD automation, model validation, and deployment pipelines.
Collaborate with Data Engineering and MLOps teams on Dockerized deployments, APIs, monitoring, and scalable inference.
Define standards for feature stores, data pipelines, and model versioning.
Partner with IT and Security teams to ensure compliant AI deployments.
Computer Vision
Develop and deploy computer vision solutions for product classification, visual merchandising, and image-based retail applications.
Integrate multimodal vision capabilities into forecasting and AI agent workflows.
Evaluate and apply modern computer vision architectures to production use cases.
Product Ownership & Continuous Improvement
Own and maintain production AI models and pipelines while driving continuous optimization.
Balance maintenance of existing solutions with development of new AI capabilities.
Identify and remediate technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and scalability issues.
Serve as technical owner for AI model performance and production incident resolution.
Documentation & Knowledge Sharing
Maintain comprehensive documentation for models, pipelines, and experiments.
Ensure reproducibility through experiment tracking, Git version control, and model lineage.
Share knowledge through code reviews, technical documentation, and internal presentations.
Contribute to R&D documentation and technical specifications.
Technical Leadership
Independently scope, design, and deliver AI solutions with minimal supervision.
Mentor team members through code reviews and architectural guidance.
Translate business problems into robust AI solutions and communicate results to technical and business stakeholders.
Apply responsible AI principles, including fairness, transparency, and model risk management.
Qualifications
Education
PhD in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field strongly preferred.
Candidates with a Master's degree and exceptional industry experience will also be considered.
Experience
Minimum 5 years of industry experience in applied data science (excluding academic research, internships, and research positions).
Proven experience deploying and maintaining production-scale ML systems.
Experience owning existing AI platforms and developing new capabilities.
Hands-on expertise with LLMs and Generative AI (RAG, prompt engineering, structured outputs, evaluation frameworks).
Experience building agentic AI systems with tool use, orchestration, and multi-step reasoning.
Working knowledge of MCP or comparable agent orchestration frameworks.
Experience developing and deploying computer vision models.
Demonstrated ability to independently lead complex technical initiatives.
Experience in commercial demand forecasting or time series modelling is a strong asset.
Experience with signal processing techniques is an asset.
Experience with ERP systems, retail data models, or supply chain data is an asset.
Technical & Soft Skills
Advanced Python (PyTorch, scikit-learn, LightGBM, XGBoost, TensorFlow/Keras, pandas, polars, NumPy) and LLM frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Anthropic/OpenAI SDKs); R is an asset.
Forecasting libraries (Prophet, DeepAR, ARIMA/SARIMA, Croston/TSB, ensemble methods).
Experience with Kedro or similar orchestration frameworks and large-scale batch processing.
MLOps expertise (MLflow, Docker, CI/CD, Git, experiment tracking, model registries, drift detection, retraining).
Experience with AWS (SageMaker, Lambda, S3, IAM, Batch), Azure ML, Azure DevOps, and Snowflake/Snowpark.
REST API development (FastAPI, Flask).
Strong statistical foundations (time series analysis, Bayesian methods, causal inference, experimental design, hypothesis testing).
Advanced SQL for enterprise-scale analytics.
Highly autonomous with the ability to independently scope and deliver complex initiatives.
Excellent written and verbal communication with technical and executive audiences.
Strong analytical rigor and sound technical judgment.
Collaborative mindset with cross-functional engineering and MLOps teams.
Comfortable making decisions and driving outcomes in ambiguous environments.
Additional Information
This is a hybrid role; 2 days per week in the Montreal, QC office is required.
We thank all applicants for their interest. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.
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Présentation de l'entreprise
Jesta I.S. est une société canadienne spécialisée dans les logiciels d'entreprise, avec plus de 55 ans d'expérience dans la fourniture de solutions stratégiques aux détaillants, grossistes et fabricants de marques du monde entier. Notre plateforme « Vision Suite » prend en charge les opérations complexes du commerce de détail (merchandising, chaîne d'approvisionnement, gestion des stocks, commerce et gestion financière) pour les secteurs de la mode, de la chaussure, des articles de sport, du luxe et du commerce de détail spécialisé. Dans le cadre de notre investissement stratégique dans l'IA, Jesta développe une nouvelle génération d'applications d'entreprise intelligentes intégrant l'analyse prédictive, l'apprentissage automatique,

Employment type
Full-Time

Work arrangement
No