Senior Manager, Data Science & Machine Learning

Job Description

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN A WORKPLACE THAT HAS…

Flexible Work Environment 💻

Retirement Savings Matching Plan (RRSP). Plan for your future with us! 💸

Personal Spending Account 💰

Up to $500 to spend on anything related to physical, mental or financial well-being (in addition to your Health Care Spending Account)

17 Paid Days Off (in addition to 13 Personal Days) 🌅

This includes an extra day off during the month of your birthday 🍰- our gift to you!

An IDEAS (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Awareness, Solidarity) team ⚖️

Weather is inclusive, we will be too. Our IDEAS team is committed to making this happen!

📣HAVE WE GOT YOUR ATTENTION? WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Read about us here! (spoiler alert… we are the home of The Weather Network )📍

WHY WE NEED YOU? GLAD YOU ASKED…

The Mandate

Applied impact over theoretical perfection. Most Data Science roles today are narrow, often focused on optimizing a single “buy” button or recommendation algorithm. At Pelmorex, your mandate is more interesting: helping model the intersection of the physical world and human behavior to solve meaningful, real‑world problems.

At its core, your mission is to fulfill the Pelmorex promise: enabling better decisions through weather intelligence. You transform raw atmospheric and behavioral data into actionable foresight so our users and partners don’t just see the weather, but understand how to respond to it.

At Pelmorex, your mandate is to bridge the gap between complex data theory and scalable product reality.

As the Senior Manager, Data Science & Machine Learning, you are the technical leader responsible for the end-to-end delivery of predictive models that power our advertising, personalization, and B2B weather solutions. While you contribute to the roadmap, your primary mission is operational excellence. You translate business requirements into technical specs, lead a high-performing squad of Data Scientists, and ensure that our AI/ML models are not just accurate, but production-ready, scalable and cost-effective. You act as the key strategic technical partner for our Product, Engineering and revenue-facing teams and you are accountable for technical direction within Data Science, team effectiveness, and the reliable deployment of high‑impact models into production.

Why Your Work Matters

At Pelmorex, Data Science is not a back‑office function; it is a core product differentiator. Your team builds the predictive layer that powers our advanced advertising technology, B2C personalization across our apps, and B2B weather‑powered decision‑support tools.

You champion responsible, transparent, and explainable use of data and machine learning. By deriving insights from location data, user movement, audience segmentation and personas, and forecast weather patterns, you enable the business to deliver highly targeted, high‑value solutions to millions of users and global commercial clients.

Please note we are only considering candidates who are eligible to work in Canada and are currently located in the Greater Toronto Area.

THE ROLE AT A GLANCE

• Lead and develop a team of ~7 Data Scientists and focused on applied machine learning.
• Set technical direction and standards for applied ML and experimentation
• Ensure models are production‑ready, scalable, and cost‑conscious in partnership with Engineering
• Act as a strategic technical partner to Product and Engineering
• Ensure reliability and performance of live models in a high-scale environment

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE (18-24 Months)

• Team Health & Growth: The team is highly engaged with low regretted turnover, clearer technical standards, and measurable growth in both applied ML capability and business context through your coaching.
• Operational & Technical Impact: Data Science consistently delivers reliable, well‑validated models that are productionized and actively used across advertising, personalization, and B2B weather‑driven solutions.
• Proactive Partnership: You are recognized as a strategic technical partner to Product and revenue-facing teams, someone who goes beyond ticket‑based work to surface opportunities, prototype approaches, and contribute informed input into roadmap discussions.
• Project-Driven Impact: You ensure that key ML initiatives (e.g., outage prediction, demand forecasting) are successfully moved into production and meet the specific business KPIs defined by the CTO and Product leaders

WHAT IS THE DAY TO DAY LIKE

• Technical Leadership & Delivery (40%)
• Set and evolve modeling and experimentation standards across areas such as time‑series forecasting, segmentation, and geospatial analysis, including clear decision thresholds for deploying models into production.
• Review and guide model design choices to ensure solutions are robust, explainable, and fit‑for‑purpose.
• Work closely with Engineering to define requirements and success criteria for data pipelines and MLOps practices, ensuring models are production-ready, cost-efficient, and scalable
• Champion pragmatic build‑vs‑buy decisions and cost‑efficient approaches.
• Act as a senior escalation point and sounding board for complex technical challenges, helping the team navigate ambiguity and make informed trade‑offs.

People Leadership & Coaching (40%)

• Directly manage and coach a team of experienced Data Scientists through regular 1:1s, goal setting, and ongoing feedback.
• Lead performance management processes including quarterly check-ins, development plans, and clear documentation of expectations and outcomes.
• Build a culture of trust, accountability, and psychological safety while setting a high bar for performance and delivery, balancing individual needs with business priorities, resource constraints, and organizational goals
• Navigate difficult conversations with empathy and clarity, including performance concerns, role clarity issues, and employee relations matters, in partnership with People & Culture.
• Foster a culture that balances analytical rigor with business pragmatism, and enable strong collaboration across Data Science, Engineering, and Product.

Cross‑Functional Partnership (20%)

• Collaborate with Product and Revenue teams to conduct technical discovery, helping to define and scope high-value ML use cases that solve identified customer friction points
• Partner with the team to explore and analyze large, complex datasets to surface non‑obvious patterns, correlations, or insights that can be translated into new or improved decision‑support tools and commercial use cases.
• Bring deep ML and data science expertise to inform solution design and technical feasibility, helping Product teams understand what is possible, what trade‑offs exist, and how ideas can be translated into testable ML hypotheses.
• Translate product strategy, market signals, and customer needs into clear technical specifications and experimentation plans that align with our data capabilities.
• Present technical findings and model performance data to leadership to help inform project prioritization, sequencing, and realistic delivery timelines.
• Occasionally act as the technical SME in key client or pre-sales meetings to provide clarity on model logic, data privacy, and the practical capabilities of our ML solutions..

AREAS OF TECHNICAL STRENGHT

• We value proven, well‑founded techniques that deliver measurable ROI. This role requires strong applied ML judgment and the ability to guide a team across multiple methods (without needing to be the deepest specialist in every area)You should bring hands-on experience in several of the following:
• Applied Machine Learning (e.g., tree‑based models, ensembles, segmentation)
• Time‑Series Forecasting and demand prediction
• Experimentation design, validation frameworks, and decision thresholds for productionWorking with large, complex datasets (including geospatial or event‑based data)
• Collaborating with  Data Engineering and MLOps teams to productionize and monitor models
• Practical judgment on when Generative AI adds value versus when traditional ML approaches are more appropriate

WE ARE HOPING YOU HAVE

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative or related field required; Master’s or PhD in a quantitative field (or equivalent deep professional experience in data science, machine learning, or applied analytics) strongly preferred.
• Experience: 7+ years of experience in data science, analytics, or related technical roles and 2–4+ years of experience leading or managing data science teams
• People Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead performance conversations (goal setting, feedback, quarterly check-ins), set clear expectations, and partner with People & Culture on employee relations matters.
• Judgment & Maturity: Comfortable making trade-offs and prioritization decisions within agreed scope, timelines, and resource constraints; able to push back constructively and align the team to realistic commitments
• Mindset: Pragmatic and impact‑focused; values shipping useful solutions over theoretical novelty.
• Communication: Able to clearly explain complex concepts to both technical and non‑technical audiences, and to communicate risks, options and tradeoffs with confidence

WHY PELMOREX

• Meaningful Data at Scale: Work with distinctive datasets spanning weather, location, audience, and commercial signals applied to real business and societal problems, not abstract exercises.
• Strong Technical Peers: Lead and develop a team of experienced data scientists who value rigor, thoughtful debate, and pragmatic application of ML techniques.
• Varied Problem Space: Contribute across multiple domains from advertising performance and personalization to weather‑driven B2B decision support offering breadth without constant context switching overload.
• Purpose‑Driven Outcomes: See your team’s work translate into products and insights that help people make better decisions and businesses prepare for and respond to weather‑related risks.
• Sustainable Growth: Join a hybrid ‑friendly, people‑centered culture that values long‑term impact, sound judgment, and balance not hype or heroics.

DON’T MEET ALL THE REQUIREMENTS? DON’T WORRY…

Not all applicants will have skills that match a job description exactly. Pelmorex values and welcomes diverse experiences. While having “desired” qualifications makes for a strong candidate, we encourage applicants with alternative experiences to also apply. If your career is just starting or hasn’t followed a traditional path, don’t let that stop you from considering Pelmorex. We are always looking for people who will be a culture add (yup, that’s right, we don’t subscribe to culture fit, we want you to add to what we think is an amazing culture and work environment

INTERESTED? IT GETS BETTER….

• Course Reimbursement Program 📚 We want you to keep learning, so we can too
• Open and transparent communication, including All Hands Meetings with our CEO
• Pelmorex Learning Academy 🏫
• Your mental health is important to us! 🧠 We partner with Inkblot for virtual counseling sessions
• Frequent employee pulse surveys 📝 we value your feedback so we can continue to make Pelmorex a great place to work!
• Free online doctor visits 👩‍⚕️ with Maple Online Healthcare
• While we encourage 1:1 conversations, we recognize that not everyone is comfortable with speaking up 🗣 We have an anonymous reporting platform to ensure everyone’s voice is heard

OUR PROMISE TO YOU…

We’re highly focused on doing the right thing.

We’ll discuss issues and timelines professionally, so you have the time you need to do the best work you can

You will see the result of your work pushed out to real users quickly

We’re a team that enjoys learning new technologies and we’re open to trying new things

We’ll try our best not to bog you down with boring meetings

Weather inspires, protects, and transforms. For 35+ years, Pelmorex has led the way with trusted forecasts and alerts. With innovation at our core, we provide precision, speed, and unmatched reliability—safeguarding lives, powering decisions, and driving business success. Whatever the weather, we turn its potential into action. We’re Pelmorex. Imagine it and we’ll deliver it.

Fair and Authentic Interview Experience

We welcome candidates using AI tools to prepare for interviews or to learn more about Pelmorex. During the interviews themselves, we expect responses to come from your own experience and thinking.

We ask that candidates not use real-time AI assistance, live answer prompts, or automated response tools during interviews. This helps ensure a fair process for everyone and allows us to evaluate how you approach problems and communicate in your own voice.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.