Head of Research

CanadaVisa; Toronto; On-site; CAD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

CV Labs, the research arm of CanadaVisa, is hiring its first Head of Research in Toronto. You will transform public data, policy signals, and proprietary information into original findings powering content, strategy, and external communications.

You will own the research agenda, set methodology standards, and ensure outputs are citable and influential across media and policy discussions. Reporting to the COO, this role blends rigorous quantitative work with AI-enabled workflows to forecast

Qualifications

• Rigorous quantitative research background with demographic or policy data.
• Ability to read policy changes and assess second-order effects.
• Strong writing to accompany methodologies and findings.

Responsibilities

• Answer the questions the business runs on with defensible market-sizing analyses.
• Build forecasting models by tracking policy signals and data patterns.
• Produce original data stories, analyses, and trend pieces for multiple channels.
• Turn proprietary signals into reliable insights with rigorous methodology.
• Size future opportunities by building scalable models for new markets.
• Be a public-facing source, ensuring your work is citable and credible.

Skills

Quantitative research

Policy data analysis

Data modeling

Forecasting

AI methods

Education

PhD preferred

Job description

Location: Toronto (hybrid)

Compensation: $130,000 – $170,000 CAD base + performance upside

Reports to: COO

Who We Are

CV Labs is the product and growth studio inside CanadaVisa, Canada's immigration engine. Our ecosystem reaches 1.5 million visitors per month, powers the country's largest immigration peer community (~1M members), processes thousands of cases per year, and delivers personalized guidance to 180,000+ registered users — all built on a 50-year licensed law firm.

We're building an AI-native law firm. The goal isn't to use technology to make lawyers 10% faster. It's to rethink from first principles how legal services are delivered, who can access them, and what a legal career looks like in 2026 and beyond.

Think of us as the best parts of a rocketship with the credibility of an institution.

The opportunity

We publish Canada's most-read immigration journalism, operate its largest immigration community, and serve clients across every major stream — which means we sit on more signal about how immigration actually works than almost anyone in the country. We're creating a research function whose job is to know things nobody else knows — and to turn that knowledge into the most authoritative content in Canadian immigration, and the sharpest strategic decisions in the company.

About the role

You'll be the company's first Head of Research: the person who takes public data, policy, and our own unmatched proprietary signal, and produces original findings the rest of the machine runs on. Your work feeds three engines. Mostly, it powers our content — original analysis, data stories, and forecasts that our newsroom, newsletters, and PR turn into coverage nobody else can write, because nobody else has the research. Alongside that, it powers strategy — you'll size markets, forecast policy, and shape where we invest next. And over time, it makes us the source others cite: the research this seat produces should end up in journalists' stories, partners' board decks, and policy conversations.

To be precise about the seam: you're the insights producer, not the publishing operation. You generate the findings, models, and analysis; our content and creative teams package and publish them (with your fingerprints on the methodology and your name on the work where it counts). You'll set the research agenda with the COO and coordinate the publishing calendar with our media team.

What you'll do

• Answer the questions the business runs on. Your first project is a market-sizing question we'll brief you on in your first week — one where a rigorous answer is worth a great deal to us and doesn't currently exist anywhere. Expect a defensible first answer in weeks, then a living model you keep honest as the world changes.

• Build the forecasting muscle. Track policy signals, draw patterns from processing and program data, and tell us what's coming before it arrives — so the company plans on foresight instead of reacting to headlines.

• Feed the content engine. Produce a steady cadence of original findings our newsroom and newsletters can build coverage on: data stories, eligibility analyses, trend pieces, annual flagship reports. The bar: research that gets cited, not summarized.

• Turn our proprietary signal into insight. We see search demand, community questions, assessment data, and case patterns at a scale no one else does. You'll build the practice (methods, privacy discipline, rigor) that converts that signal into findings — responsibly.

• Size what's next. As the company evaluates new practice areas and markets, you build the models that say how big, how durable, and how reachable each one really is.

• Be citable. Represent the work — methodology notes, media briefings, the occasional stage — so that "according to research from CanadaVisa" becomes a phrase journalists and partners reach for.

The right person for this role will have

• A rigorous quantitative research background. You've done serious empirical work with demographic, economic, or policy data — census and administrative datasets, survey design, population modeling. A PhD is a strong signal, not a requirement; a publication record, a StatCan or think‑tank pedigree, or equivalent proof of rigor counts just as much.

• Domain depth in migration, demography, or public policy — or the demonstrated ability to build it fast. You should be able to read an IRCC program change and see the second‑order effects before lunch.

• A translator's gift. Your findings make it into headlines without losing their integrity. You can write the methods appendix and the sentence a journalist quotes.

• Production instincts. You've worked to a cadence — publications, reports, briefings — not just toward a dissertation. Research that ships beats research that's perfect.

• AI-native methods. You already use AI throughout your workflow — data wrangling, literature synthesis, model prototyping — and you're excited to push what one researcher with modern tools can produce. Here, that's a team's worth of output.

• Intellectual honesty over advocacy. Our credibility is the asset. You'd rather publish an inconvenient finding with caveats than a convenient one without — and you'll tell us plainly when the data says something we don't want to hear. (Internally, that's the job too.)

• Comfort being the whole function. No lab, no RAs on day one — you, the datasets, the tools, and a company that will act on what you find.

Bonus points if you have

• Direct research experience on Canadian immigration, citizenship, or diaspora populations

• Experience at Statistics Canada, IRCC, a think tank, or an academic centre focused on migration

• A public research byline — reports, papers, or data journalism people actually read

• Genealogy, historical-records, or population-ancestry research exposure

• Experience making research a growth engine at a company (content-led or PR-led)

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary of $130,000 – $170,000 CAD, plus performance upside, dependent on experience

• Flexible vacation — take what you need; we care about what you ship

• Competitive health, dental, and wellness coverage

• Direct partnership with the COO, a media platform with 1.5M monthly readers waiting for your findings, and a research function that is yours to define

Why CV Labs

Because researchers spend careers hoping their work influences something. Here, the loop is days long: you find it, the country's most-read immigration publication runs it, the company acts on it, and a million-person audience feels it. You'll have proprietary data nobody in your field can touch, distribution nobody in your field can reach, and the standing question every researcher wants: tell us what's true, and we'll build accordingly.

If you've ever finished a piece of rigorous work and wished someone would actually use it — we'd like to meet you.

Don't let imposter syndrome stop you from applying. Great people sometimes don't have the "right" experience. If you think you'll be amazing at this role, we encourage you to apply.