“If you are excited about applying Natural Language Processing (NLP)

and Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle real-world challenges in government document analysis, this is a perfect opportunity for you. Be a part of the team of research and machine learning scientists building deployable real-world ML applications from ground up and get mentored by some of the best minds in AI during the process.”

• Atefeh Shahroudnejad, Machine Learning Scientist and Mara Cairo, Product Owner, Advanced Technology

Description About the Role

This is a paid Residency that will be undertaken over a twelve-month period with the potential to be hired by our client, Ontopical, afterwards (note: at the discretion of the client). The Resident will report to an Amii Scientist and regularly consult with the client team to share insights and engage in knowledge transfer activities.

Successful candidates will be members of a cross-functional project team with backgrounds in ML research, project management, software engineering, and new product development. This is a rare opportunity to be mentored by world-class scientists and to develop something truly impactful.

About The Client Ontopical is transforming the way companies discover and win government procurement opportunities. With a cutting-edge market intelligence platform, enhanced by an AI Copilot, Oliver, Ontopical empowers enterprise customers—primarily in construction, engineering, consulting, and software—to detect opportunities early through comprehensive data insights. As part of our nimble, scale-up culture, you’ll step into an environment where innovation and collaboration drive everything we do.

About The Project The Resident will have the opportunity to work with large-scale retrieval, information extraction, personalization, and recommendation on challenging but information rich data comprising municipal meeting minutes, agenda, budget, and plan documents. The project has existing solutions that can be expanded upon and improved, with plenty of opportunity also for novel, creative, effective solutions. Ultimately our goal is to bring our customers the insights and data that will connect them with municipalities across North America to solve the many challenges they deal with every day.

Required Skills / Expertise Are you passionate about building great solutions? You’ll be presented with opportunities to both personally and professionally develop as you build your career. We’re looking for a talented and enthusiastic individual with a solid background in machine learning, NLP, and LLMs, along with proven experience in applied settings.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, optimize, and evaluate ML models that leverage NLP, LLMs, and RAG for analyzing diverse types of documents.
• Identify, prepare, and optimize large structured and unstructured datasets for ML training
• Utilize state-of-the-art ML frameworks, APIs, and tools.
• Undertake applied research on ML techniques to address the limitations in existing models.
• Optimize ML pipelines to ensure efficient and scalable text analysis capabilities.
• Collaborate with the project team and stakeholders to develop MVP and client focused solutions.
• Engage in regular client meetings, contributing to presentations and reports on project progress.

Required Qualifications

• Completion of a graduate level program or higher (M.S./Ph.D) in Computer Science, ML or Engineering with a specialization in NLP.
• Research or project experience in text analysis, information retrieval, and NLP use cases.
• Experience with advanced models such as Transformers.
• Proficient in Python programming language and related ML frameworks, libraries, and toolkits (e.g., Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Pandas, HuggingFace).
• Familiarity with linux, Git version control, and writing clean code.
• A positive attitude towards learning and understanding a new applied domain.
• Must be legally eligible to work in Canada.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience applying ML and NLP to text data for information extraction from diverse types of documents.
• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning.
• Familiarity with document analysis, text processing challenges, and document metadata extraction.
• Experience with deploying machine learning models in production environments or strong software engineering (or MLE) skills is a plus.
• Publication record in peer-reviewed academic conferences or relevant journals in ML or Applied AI (especially in NLP or LLMs).
• Familiarity with AWS and GCP.

Non-Technical Requirements

• Desire to take ownership of a problem and demonstrated leadership skills
• Interdisciplinary team player enthusiastic about working together to achieve excellence
• Capable of critical and independent thought
• Able to communicate technical concepts clearly and advise on the application of machine intelligence
• Intellectual curiosity and the desire to learn new things, techniques, and technologies

Why You Should Apply

Besides Gaining Industry Experience, Additional Perks Include

• Work under the mentorship of an Amii Scientist for the duration of the project
• Participate in professional development activities
• Gain access to the Amii community and events
• Get paid for your work (a fair and equitable rate of pay will be negotiated at the time of offer)
• Build your professional network
• The opportunity for an ongoing machine learning role at the client’s organization at the end of the term (at the client’s discretion)

About Amii One of Canada’s three main institutes for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, our world-renowned researchers drive fundamental and applied research at the University of Alberta (and other academic institutions), training some of the world’s top scientific talent. Our cross-functional teams work collaboratively with Alberta-based businesses and organizations to build AI capacity and translate scientific advancement into industry adoption and economic impact.

How to Apply

If this sounds like the opportunity you've been waiting for, please don’t wait for the closing October 7, 2025 to apply - we’re excited to add a new member to the Amii team for this role, and the posting may come down sooner than the closing date if we find the right candidate before the posting closes! When sending your application, please send your resume and cover letter indicating why you think you'd be a fit for Amii. In your cover letter, please include one professional accomplishment you are most proud of and why.

Applicants must be legally eligible to work in Canada at the time of application.

Amii is an equal opportunity employer and values a diverse workforce. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals without regard to ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age or disability. Accommodations for disability-related needs throughout the recruitment and selection process are available upon request. Any information provided by you for accommodations will be kept confidential and won’t be used in the selection process.