Staff Applied AI Scientist - Ottawa, ON

Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information across enterprises, governments, and consumers.

Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend harnesses AI to protect organizations and individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints.

The Trend Vision One™ enterprise cybersecurity platform accelerates proactive security outcomes by predicting and preventing threats across the entire digital estate and environments like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.

Proactive security starts here.

Location: This is a hybrid role with a minimum in-office requirement of 3 days per week in the Ottawa, ON office located at 40 Hines Rd, Ottawa, ON K2K 2M5.

Position Summary:

Trend Micro is a world-leading cybersecurity company that focuses on building cutting-edge AI applications and services, with a mission to secure these technologies and ensure a safer AI-driven world. We are seeking talented professionals to join our team in developing and optimizing advanced machine learning and AI systems.

As a Staff Applied AI Scientist, you will contribute across the full machine learning lifecycle, driving innovation in AI for cybersecurity and advancing techniques to secure AI applications. You will combine strong theoretical foundations with hands-on engineering to design, build, and operate production-grade AI systems at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Own the full lifecycle of language models and other deep learning models, from design and training through evaluation, deployment, and continuous improvement for enterprise-grade applications.

• Design efficient, scalable AI systems, applying strong mathematical foundations to problem formulation and model architecture selection.

• Drive key technical decisions on how models are developed and adapted, selecting appropriate training, tuning, and optimization approaches for each use case.

• Prototype novel approaches using expert-level programming skills and evaluate their performance in production environments.

• Build and operate AI Ops pipelines, including evaluation metrics, monitoring, drift detection, and automated lifecycle management.

• Stay current with the state of the art in language, vision, and multimodal models, and apply relevant advances to real-world cybersecurity problems.

Core Skills & Experience:

• Hands-on, end-to-end experience bringing LLM/SLM research into production, including fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, inference optimization, evaluation pipelines, and AI Ops integration.

• Demonstrated experience taking AI models from research through production, including responsibility for deployment, monitoring, and ongoing iteration in live systems, as well as building and deploying containerized AI microservices.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex concepts clearly.

• Strong problem-solving skills, creativity, and curiosity.

• A passion for staying ahead in a fast-moving AI landscape.

Expertise in one or more of the following areas:

• Balancing data, model, and infrastructure trade-offs to meet real business SLAs and cost constraints.

• Fine-tuning LLMs using modern toolchains (e.g., LLaMA-Factory, NVIDIA NeMo) and PEFT methods (LoRA and newer PEFT variants).

• Reinforcement learning for LLMs and agents (e.g., VeRL/verl, SkyRL, Ray RLlib) for RLHF, reasoning fine-tuning, and agentic training.

• Production inference with frameworks such as vLLM, NVIDIA NIM, Triton, CUDA/NCCL, and PyTorch/XLA, including quantization, distillation, kernel-level optimizations, and end-to-end profiling and benchmarking.

• Model optimization for throughput and latency using TensorRT, quantization techniques, and custom kernels.

• AI Ops and observability tooling, such as Weights & Biases, MLflow, and Ray Serve.

What We Offer You:

You're important to us. What matters to you, matters to us too. Trend Micro provides benefit options for you and your family.

• Group benefits program with health and dental coverage

• Telehealth Virtual Health Services

• Life Insurance

• Short & Long Term Disability

• Pre-partum, maternity, parental and medical leave

• Critical Illness Insurance

• Mental Health Wellness Program

• Wellness Incentive Program

• Retirement Savings Programs with company match

• Paid Time Off

• 14 Annual Holidays

• Tuition Assistance

• Employee Resource Groups

We offer competitive compensation with bonus opportunity tied to company performance, along with room to enhance your skills through ongoing learning and broad technological opportunities. Achieving work-life balance is a priority, complemented by team activities, fostering an environment rooted in equity, inclusion, and collaboration, that is reflected in both our culture and our work.

Trend Micro Canada has been recognized as one of the National Capital Region's Top Employers. If you're curious to learn more, click the link below to discover why joining Trend Micro could be the perfect career move for you:

Be Passionate. Be Innovative. Be a Trender.

No sponsorship will be provided for work permit applications or renewals for this position now or in the future.

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