Senior Machine Learning Engineer

About Blue J

Blue J is the leading generative AI solution for tax professionals and one of Canada's fastest-growing AI companies. Headquartered in Toronto, we're a high-growth B2B SaaS company building industry-leading tax research software that helps accountants find accurate answers to complex tax questions with greater speed and confidence, supporting workflows across compliance, advisory, training, tax writing, and more.

Backed by a $176M USD Series E funding round, we're scaling rapidly across North America and the UK while continuing to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI. By combining advanced technology with deep tax expertise, we empower tax professionals to work more efficiently, make better decisions, and deliver greater value to their clients.

We're now looking for a skilled Senior Machine Learning Engineer who thrives in a fast-paced environment and is passionate about shaping the future of AI-assisted tax research. Your work will directly advance our product and AI capabilities, keeping our technology at the leading edge.

The core values that define our culture

• We are customer-focused
• We put the team interest before self-interest
• We are pleasant and playful
• We are open to better ideas
• We deliver on our promises
• We solve the tough problems

About The Team

Our Data Science and AI team is made up of curious, creative people who love solving tough problems. Much of our work focuses on Applied Generative AI, traditional AI/ML systems where we design, orchestrate, and optimize ML, agentic workflows and retrieval systems that bring intelligence and precision to complex domains like tax and legal analysis. Whether it’s improving prompt performance, refining context retrieval, or working with the latest commercial and open-source foundation models, we’re always looking for opportunities to make our AI tools smarter and more reliable.

We care deeply about both quality and speed. Strong engineering practices help us move quickly and confidently, and we do. Our models and data pipelines are updated and deployed regularly, allowing us to learn fast and continuously improve.

We share knowledge through lunch-and-learns, collaborative brainstorms, and tight partnership with Product and Engineering to turn ideas into measurable impact.

About the Role

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll help shape the next generation of intelligent features and systems that power our products. You’ll work closely with data scientists, and software engineers to design, build scalable search, RAG and agentic RAG solutions. You will work with LLMs and other ML models very deeply, structure agentic workflows and dynamic context retrieval and conduct multi dimensional evaluation of model outputs in production.

This role is a great fit for someone who’s curious about data and eager to turn insights into real-world impact. You’ll also support other team members through mentorship, sharing what you know, and collaboration to grow our machine learning practice.

What You'll be Doing

• Designing, building and evaluating applied ML systems, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered services.
• Writing high-quality, well-tested ML code while collaborating with other engineers and data scientists to deliver reliable, production-ready features.
• Collaborating with product and engineering to bring state-of-the-art ML techniques including deep learning, NLP, and generative AI into real-world tax applications
• Participating in hypothesis-driven experimentation: using evals, logs, and user feedback to rapidly iterate on prompt design, context retrieval, and model interactions.
• Sharing knowledge, reviewing code, and helping continuously improve our software standards, tooling, and developer practices.
• Staying on top of emerging LLM capabilities, tooling, and patterns to bring practical innovations into our product stack.

Your Skills and Experience

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in machine learning engineering, with a strong background in Python, Typescript etc.
• Solid understanding of machine learning fundamentals, data structures, and algorithms, with experience deploying ML models into production environments
• Familiarity with practical AI concepts, such as semantic search, vector indexing, evaluation metrics, or structured output generation
• Hands-on experience with search or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and/or agentic AI, such as implementing end-to-end pipelines and understanding core components
• Proven experience leading technical projects or teams, ideally involving ML systems or data products
• Strong communication skills, you can explain complex technical ideas clearly and collaborate effectively across teams
• A pragmatic, growth-oriented mindset focused on shipping continuous value through short iteration loops.

Technologies You Can Expect to Work With

• Languages & Frameworks: Python, TypeScript / Node.js
• ML & Data Tools: Proprietary and Open Source LLMs, Agents SDK/ADK, Langchain/Langraph, PyTorch / TensorFlow / scikit-learn, Hugging Face
• Data Infrastructure: Apache Kafka / PostgreSQL / Pinecone Vector Search / Elasticsearch
• MLOps & DevOps: Kubernetes / AWS / Docker / DataDog / MLflow

A Bit About Us

• We’re well-funded and offer competitive base salaries and stock options. You’ll play a crucial role in our growth, and it’s important to us that you share in our long-term success.
• We are taking an exciting, highly anticipated new product into a virtually untapped market at a time when there is a huge amount of buzz around the type of work that we do. You’ll have the opportunity to work at our growing organization, and play a meaningful role in our expansion.
• We've got great leadership and you'll get to work with and learn from team leaders with a proven track record of success in the technology industry.
• We’ve got an amazing team. We’re mission-driven and motivated by success, but we’re friendly, we’re collaborative, and we care about each other. We’ve got all the start-up perks you’d expect, and are intentionally building a culture where you can pickleball if you want, feel safe to be yourself at work, and watch your career grow because your team has invested in you.
• We care about you. You’ll have a healthy work/life balance and colleagues who respect it. We’ve mindfully put together a great benefits package that covers you and your whole family.

The Core Values That Define Our Culture

• We are customer-focused
• We put the team interest before self-interest
• We are pleasant and playful
• We are open to better ideas
• We move fast and fix things

What To Expect In The Interview Process

We’re expecting strong interest in this role and are looking forward to growing our team! A human will review every application and we’ll get back to all candidates within 10 days of submission. Thanks for your patience, we look forward to connecting!

Interview Process

• Chat with Dan, Talent Acquisition Manager
• Meet Soumali, Director of AI
• Technical exercises with our engineering team
• System design
• Meet Brett, our CTO
• Meet Ben, our CEO

We believe our strength is built on diversity of thought, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds and experiences to apply. We value inclusiveness and are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We strive to create an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you need any accommodations during the interview process, please let us know in your application. Our team is dedicated to providing the necessary support and making reasonable adjustments to ensure a smooth process for everyone.

How We Use AI In Our Hiring Process

• To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Blue J uses AI-enabled tools within our applicant tracking system to help organize applications and highlight profiles that match the key requirements for each role.
• AI does not make hiring decisions.
• Every application is reviewed by a member of our Talent team, and all decisions throughout the process are made by humans.
• We use these tools to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment and we’re committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is $140,000-$180,000 per year.

This is a Level 4 in Blue J’s career level framework. We use levels to define the expected scope, autonomy, impact, decision-making, and experience for each role. Final compensation will be set fairly and thoughtfully based on experience, expertise, and alignment with the role’s responsibilities. While all candidates are expected to bring directly relevant experience, the top of the range is typically reserved for individuals who demonstrate exceptional depth in the role’s core competencies, a strong track record of impact in similar environments, and the ability to operate with a high degree of autonomy from day one.