Applied AI Engineer

Urban Ridge Supplies; Mississauga; On-site; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Hygiena in Mississauga, Ontario seeks an Applied AI Engineer to design, build, and deploy GenAI/LLM applications across Hygiena products, including data-driven copilots, retrieval systems, and automation.

You will collaborate with product, data, and safety teams to implement secure, scalable AI solutions, align with regulatory standards, and advance MLOps, testing, and deployment practices in a fast-growing environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 3–5 years of professional software, AI, or ML engineering experience with backend fundamentals.
• 1+ years building and deploying LLM-powered applications in production.
• Strong Python and API/service integration experience with enterprise systems.
• Experience with frontier GenAI platforms like Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship production-grade GenAI/LLM applications across Hygiena products.
• Implement agentic workflows with tool use, multi-step execution, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Develop advanced retrieval and knowledge systems with grounding to authoritative sources.
• Engineer across full SDLC with MLOps/GenAIOps practices and observability.
• Security-test LLM/agentic systems and harden outputs with guardrails.
• Integrate AI solutions into enterprise environments and collaborate across teams.

Skills

Python proficiency

API design

GenAI/LLM platforms

MLOps/LLMOps

Security testing

Cloud experience

Retrieval/QA systems

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in CS/Data Science/Engineering

Master’s degree a plus

Tools

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Azure Machine Learning

AWS/Azure/Google Cloud

Job description

At Hygiena we believe:

• In providing the highest quality products & service


• Being a leader in innovation


• Having a compelling desire to improve and win in the marketplace


• In contributing positively not only in the workplace, but in our community and environment!

With rapid growth comes opportunity. We are looking for an Applied AI Engineer (LLM Applications Engineer) to join our team onsite in our Mississauga, Ontario Canada office! This is a full-time / exempt position.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and ship production-grade GenAI/LLM applications across Hygiena products including SureTrend — copilots, conversational agents and assistants, workflow automation, and decision support. Implement agentic workflows (tool use, multi-step execution, human-in-the-loop controls) with attention to reliability, safety, and clear failure modes.


• Design and build advanced retrieval and knowledge systems (RAG): hybrid search, vector and graph stores, indexing strategies, reranking, caching, and source attribution — grounding generation in authoritative sources such as regulatory frameworks (FSMA, HACCP, Codex), validation standards (AOAC, MicroVal, AFNOR), SOPs, and technical documentation.


• Engineer for production across the full SDLC (build \u2192 test \u2192 deploy \u2192 monitor \u2192 iterate). Implement MLOps/GenAIOps practices (CI/CD, reproducibility, environment parity, model/prompt/agent versioning) and build evaluation and observability for GenAI and agentic systems — tracing and instrumentation, regression test suites, automated scoring, and prompt/policy iteration loops.


• Security-test and red-team LLM and agentic systems — probing for prompt injection, jailbreaks, data/PII leakage, insecure tool use, and unsafe or non-compliant outputs; build adversarial test suites and harden systems and guardrails based on findings. Design for secure deployment with access controls, auditability, sensitive-data handling, and responsible-AI guardrails suited to a regulated domain.


• Configure and integrate AI solutions into enterprise and customer environments — APIs, data systems, and business applications (e.g., LIMS, QMS, ERP, and collaboration tools) — balancing quality, latency, cost, privacy, and adoption. Support data preparation, transformation, and validation that feeds retrieval, evaluation, and model training/deployment.


• Collaborate with Product Managers, Data Engineers, ML Engineering, and food safety scientists; translate ambiguous product and domain needs into clear technical requirements and tradeoffs; document patterns, decisions, and instrumentation; and stay current on emerging AI tools, models, and frameworks, bringing promising ones into real Hygiena use cases.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; Master’s a plus.


• Minimum of 3–5 years of professional software, AI, or ML engineering experience, with strong backend engineering fundamentals.


• 1+ years of hands\u2011on experience building and deploying LLM\u2011powered applications in production, with real delivery considerations (latency, cost, reliability, security).


• Strong proficiency in Python and experience building APIs/services (e.g., REST/gRPC) and integrating with enterprise systems.


• Hands\u2011on experience with at least one frontier GenAI platform — Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI — and its key building blocks (e.g., Claude API, Claude for Enterprise, tool use, extended thinking, Claude Code; Gemini API, Vertex AI Agent Builder, grounding; OpenAI Assistants/Responses APIs, Agents SDK).


• Experience building advanced retrieval/search systems (hybrid retrieval, vector search, reranking) and comfort working across multiple data stores (vector, graph, relational/document/search).


• Experience implementing agentic patterns (context management, memory/state, orchestration, and tool use).


• Familiarity with conversational AI frameworks (LLMs, chatbots, virtual assistants, agents) and their APIs.


• Experience with MLOps/LLMOps practices (evaluation frameworks, model monitoring, prompt management) on a platform such as Azure Machine Learning, and with LLM application frameworks/tooling (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), preferred.


• Experience security\u2011testing or red\u2011teaming LLM/agentic systems (e.g., prompt injection, jailbreaks, data leakage), and familiarity with frameworks such as the OWASP Top\xa0 10 for LLM Applications, preferred.


• Experience with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud), common platform services (storage, compute, IAM, networking), containers, and CI/CD preferred.


• Data engineering or data\u2011science background (e.g., Spark, Airflow/dbt, feature engineering, experimentation, model evaluation), and experience in a regulated or safety\u2011critical industry such as food safety, diagnostics, or life sciences, is advantageous but not required.

Skills:

• Strong product sense and a delivery mindset — takes ideas from proof\u2010of\u2010concept to MVP to production, designing for how real users will rely on AI outputs.


• Rigor around accuracy, traceability, safety, and security — designs for trust, guardrails, and graceful failure in a regulated, safety\u2011critical domain.


• Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration; able to prototype quickly, evaluate rigorously, and harden into reliable production code.


• Clear communication of technical and design decisions to diverse audiences, including Product, ML Engineering, Data, and Customers.


• Collaborative mindset; works effectively across Engineering, Data, Product, and food safety/domain teams.


• Intellectually curious and committed to staying current with advances in generative AI and applied LLM engineering.


• High ownership mentality — takes responsibility for the quality, reliability, and safety of the AI features they ship.

Why you’ll want to join Hygiena:

Teamwork as a core value

Our emphasis on teamwork and cross\u2010functional communication enables us to build stronger bonds within our business.

Be a part of something big

We play a critical role in helping to prevent global health crisis such as foodborne illness, healthcare\u2010associated infections, and other outbreaks.

Giving back to our communities

We believe in giving back by supporting local organizations committed to improving the lives of children and youth in our communities.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.