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About the Company

Our client is a global leader in the financial services industry with a well established Canadian footprint serving millions of customers with a myriad of best-of-class products and services.

A well-known employer of choice, our client’s brand extends to superior customer service and experience both via its extensive brick-and-mortar network and its continually evolving digital capabilities.  Technology will play an ever-more important role in providing the rich omni-channel experience expected by customers.

Our client now seeks an AVP, Data Science to serve a critical role in its Canadian operations.

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Scope of Position

Reporting to the Vice President, Enterprise Analytics, the successful candidate will collaborate with an exciting team of actuaries, data scientists and engineers at the forefront of leveraging data to drive decisions at every level of our client’s organization.

A critical enabler for the firm’s ongoing digital transformation, the ideal candidate will be an expert in analytics and data science and will have direct influence on future products and innovative solutions.

Leading a small, dynamic team with exposure to different business stakeholders the successful candidate will work on impactful projects that range from predicting customer life-time values and optimizing customer journeys to incorporating novel data sources for building cutting-edge pricing algorithms.  You will leverage machine-learning algorithms to automate and predict claim outcomes and find new and innovative ways to impact our customers.

A hands-on leader, the successful candidate will have the technical acumen to both propose solutions and build algorithms and at the same time provide strategic leadership and manage projects.

The successful candidate will propose machine-learning and statistical models for practical applications that impacts millions of customers.  The team has already developed algorithms used in production systems and you will lead the team that expands the scope of these algorithms. This is your chance to join the InsureTech revolution!

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Preferred Experience / Education

As AVP, Data Sciences you will possess the following industry, academic and functional experience/qualifications:

• An educational background in computer-science or engineering, math, statistics, physics or related field. A minimum of MSc is required and Phd preferred.
• 3+ years of experience in managing highly technical teams and leading large projects.
• 5+ years of experience with model development and working with large datasets. This can include experience from any industry or academia (post-doc experience).
• 5+ programming experience in Python or R with good grasp of software engineering best practices such as code-reusability, modularity, use of repos, etc.
• Proven track record of success in the development and deployment of data management, data governance, data analytics and business intelligence projects and programs;
• Prior experience in helping organizations mature their data science framework, governance and capabilities;
• Leadership style that exhibits strategic thinking, high energy, collaboration, direct communication and results orientation;
• Strong commercial orientation with the ability to interpret business requirements and translate those into actionable and practical technology strategies;
• Strong communication skills, ability to collaborate with key business and technology stakeholders to develop recommendations, achieve buy-in and achieve measurable results;
• A growth mindset with versatile skills and able to work through problems from first-principles.
• A portfolio of projects that demonstrate your ability to draw inferences from data. This includes participation within the broader data science community including Kaggle competitions or any personal projects with open data.
• A can-do team player who is willing to roll-up the sleeves and do whatever is needed to move projects forward. That means at times you will wear multiple hats and be a project manager, developer, modeler and chief communicator of solutions.
• Amazing people skills and able to translate and communicate complex algorithms to non-technical experts. Someone who understands that it is not enough to just have a great algorithm but important to create a buy-in for the solution from different stakeholders.
• The best problems in the industry are yet to be articulated. We need someone who is creative, self-motivated and can lead projects independently.