Senior Member of Technical Staff (Applied AI) (Toronto)

Solstice; Toronto; On-site; CAD 210,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health, dental, and vision coverage

RRSP matching

Unlimited PTO

Travel to New York covered

Growth stipend

Job summary

Solstice in Toronto is seeking a senior Applied AI engineer to own the technical direction of our AI systems, including retrieval, generation, verification, evaluation, and keeping systems running in production. You will shape strategy and influence hiring with the VP of Engineering and our co-founders Aris and Yiwen.

This role starts on-site in Toronto, with the first month in New York for hands-on collaboration.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping and maintaining ML/LLM systems in production.
• Ability to invent and apply metrics to improve systems.
• Strong knowledge of retrieval, generation, and verification in AI.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction of our AI systems in production.
• Collaborate with VP of Engineering and co-founders on strategy and hiring.
• Lead architecture decisions and ensure scalable delivery.
• Drive MLR alignment and robust evaluation metrics.
• Oversee ML Ops, CI/CD, versioning, and monitoring.

Skills

Production ownership

Evaluation instinct

Depth in LLMs

Full-stack proficiency

Judgment under ambiguity

Communication

Tools

Python

FastAPI

Docker

AWS

Job description

SENIOR MEMBER OF TECHNICAL STAFF (APPLIED AI)

LOCATION: TORONTO, ONTARIO

WHY YOU SHOULD JOIN US

Solstice is redefining how life sciences organizations commercialize therapeutics. We are building a commercial engine that allows pharmaceutical marketers to launch campaigns at 100x the speed. Our mission is to accelerate the knowledge of life-saving medicines.

• Rapid growth: Over the past year, we have worked with some of the top life sciences manufacturers and over 50+ pharma brands including Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

• A hard technical problem: We are trying to rethink the way the largest, most innovative therapies in the world come to market. Every claim in pharma marketing content must trace to an approved source. Fair balance rules govern placement. All materials go through rigorous medical, legal, and regulatory review, which can last months. Building persuasive and defensible content is a genuine challenge, with no playbook. We have the customers and proprietary data to do this right.

• Top-tier investors: Our backers include Transformation Capital, Twelve Below, Virtue and the founders of Datavant, Commure, and Paradigm.

• Influence and ownership: This senior role directly shapes our architectural future. We're seeking someone who wants responsibility, not someone who needs work handed to them.

SOLSTICE IN TORONTO

We're opening our first engineering office outside New York, in Toronto. This is one of the first hires there. The Toronto team will own a product area end to end, with its own roadmap and on-call. It won't be a queue for work handed over from New York.

• For the right person, this role leads Toronto engineering. That includes a seat in engineering leadership from your first week and a direct hand in hiring and growing the team that joins after you.

• Same time zone as New York, and one of our co-founders will be in Toronto with the team.

• You'll spend your first month in New York working alongside the team in person. We cover travel and accommodation.

• This role will be on-site in Toronto. We'll start remotely for the first few months, with a WeWork stipend for those who prefer it. As the team grows, we'll move into our own Toronto office by the end of the year and work from there five days a week.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're hiring a senior Applied AI engineer to own the technical direction of our AI systems: retrieval, generation, verification, evaluation, and keeping systems running in production. Nothing's predetermined. When there's a fork in the road, you decide.

You will work closely with VP of Engineering Jay, and co-founders Aris and Yiwen, influencing product strategy, technical hiring, and our market positioning.

WHAT YOU'LL BE WORKING ON

• High-craft output: Our clients demand work with polish, not "AI slop." Pharma assets like emails, banners, slides and leave-behinds require both visual and textual excellence. ISI must be prominent, brand systems must endure, and hierarchy and typography must survive generation. Our job isn't just compliance. It's making sure assets don't get quietly rewritten by marketers.

• Connecting content to outcomes: Passing MLR review means a piece can ship, but not that it worked. We'll connect generated assets to real-world performance, including engagement, HCP response and scripts written, and use that data to improve future output.

• Evaluation where ground truth is slow: Determining compliance is slow, coming back as reviewer redlines in inconsistent formats. Developing offline metrics that track downstream MLR pass rate is critical.

• Claim-level attribution: True grounding means every sentence can be traced back to a specific, defensible source. Our proprietary corpora span prescribing information, clinical data, approved assets, style guides and claim libraries, and provenance must be preserved through generation.

• ML Ops and behavioral regression: Full CI/CD for ML, versioning, automated testing, monitoring, and the harder under-the-hood work. Upgrades shift output in ways easy stats can miss, and tail risks matter most. Ongoing vigilance is required.

IDEAL TRAITS

• Production ownership: Experience shipping, operating, and maintaining ML/LLM systems in production.

• Evaluation instinct: History of inventing metrics to measure and improve systems.

• Depth in LLMs: Retrieval, agentic pipelines, targeted fine-tuning, and judgment on the best tool for each job.

• Full-stack proficiency: Python, FastAPI, Docker, AWS; able to take ideas from research to deployed service independently.

• Judgment under ambiguity: Confident decisions amid unknowns; unafraid to be wrong and adjust fast.

• Communication: Strong collaboration and feedback skills; direct and open style preferred.

BENEFITS

• Supplemental health, dental, and vision coverage on top of OHIP

• Ground-floor equity, granted on the same schedule as our New York team

• RRSP matching

• Unlimited PTO

• Your first month in New York, with travel and accommodation covered

• Professional growth stipend

COMPENSATION

Highly competitive Toronto salary: CAD $210,000 to $300,000 depending on experience, seniority, and ownership level, plus equity. We pay at the top of the Toronto market, with the top of the range reserved for the person who leads the Toronto team. We grant equity on the same schedule in every office.

This posting is for an existing vacancy. You must be legally entitled to work in Canada. We can't sponsor work permits for this role at this time.