Job Description

We are hiring an AI Quality and Evaluation Lead, Application Development!
Reporting To: Assistant Vice President IT, Application Development
Full-Time/Part- Time: Full-time
Salary Range: $80,021-$128,034
Posting Date: August 21, 2026
Closing Date: September 21, 2026
Hours of Work: 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Grade: 14.4
Office Location: Toronto Great location! Steps away from the main public transit station
What we offer:
Highly competitive compensation package which includes, base salary, bonus, benefits, and career advancement opportunities!
*Eligibility for benefits is dependent on the terms of employment

The Opportunity:
The AI Quality and Evaluation Lead is accountable for the evaluation strategy, quality standards, release gates, guardrails, and continuous monitoring used across First National AI Factory solutions.

This role defines what good enough to ship means for AI enabled mortgage workflows, and converts business policy, risk appetite, user expectations, and production evidence into measurable acceptance criteria. Working within the AI Platform Squad, leads hands on evaluation for residential underwriting use cases with the mandate to evolve a scalable quality capability as the AI Factory grows, including reusable test assets, automated continuous evaluation, consistent scorecards, and clear accountability between product squads and shared quality teams.

How you will contribute:
• Own and continuously evolve the AI Factory quality and evaluation strategy, including risk tiers, standard metrics, acceptance thresholds, representative test suites, release evidence, monitoring expectations, and continuous improvement practices across product squads.
• Define use case specific quality measures with the Product Manager, the Residential Underwriting Business SME, the AI Engineering Lead, QA Engineers, Risk, Compliance, and Security, covering policy adherence, factual grounding, completeness, precision, recall, false positives, false negatives, confidence, explainability, user impact, and appropriate escalation.
• Own the methodology for evaluation harnesses, golden datasets, adversarial tests, regression suites, human review protocols, and automated scoring workflows across document intelligence, retrieval, summarization, agent tool use, deterministic calculations, and multi step workflows, with the AI Platform Squad building and operating the underlying evaluation infrastructure.
• Establish the quality and evaluation gates within First National production readiness standards, jointly with the AI Engineering Lead who owns engineering and operational readiness, including UAT and parallel run evidence, minimum performance thresholds, guardrail validation, privacy and access control checks, rollback criteria, kill switch readiness, runbooks, and approval records.
• In collaboration with Information Security conduct failure mode testing for prompt injection, data leakage, unsupported claims, policy deviations, tool misuse, unsafe write back, inappropriate automation, model degradation, and other AI specific operational risks.
• Monitor production quality using evaluation results, model and prompt versions, drift, latency, user feedback, exception rates, override patterns, incidents, and token or platform cost, and define the triggers for investigation, rollback, retraining, prompt changes, or workflow redesign.
• Create defect taxonomies and root cause practices that distinguish model, retrieval, prompt, data, rules, integration, user experience, and process issues, and work with product and engineering teams to prioritize durable fixes.
• Evolve the function from hands on evaluation of the first use cases to a federated operating model, with reusable scorecards, automated continuous evaluation, trained squad level QA practices, oversight of AI Quality Analysts as volume grows, independent model and vendor benchmarking, and audit ready quality evidence.

The experience you need:
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, data science, statistics, mathematics, information systems or a related discipline.
• 7 plus years of progressive experience in quality engineering, software testing, model validation, machine learning, data science, risk analytics, AI governance, or related technology disciplines.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks and release criteria for production AI or generative AI systems, including RAG, document intelligence, agents, model and prompt lifecycle management, observability, and human in the loop controls.
• Strong analytical and technical skills with Python, SQL, test automation, data analysis, statistical methods, and evaluation tooling such as MLflow, Ragas, DeepEval, or comparable frameworks.
• Working knowledge of accuracy and retrieval metrics, confidence scoring, sampling, experiment design, regression testing, drift monitoring, adversarial testing, red teaming, guardrails, privacy, security, and operational risk controls.
• Ability to translate business policy and risk appetite into measurable acceptance criteria, and to explain quality, risk, and trade off implications clearly to technical, business, control, audit, and senior stakeholders.
• Experience building or scaling a quality capability through reusable standards, automated test assets, continuous monitoring, governance evidence, coaching, and leadership of analysts or cross functional quality communities, including exposure to model risk, credit risk, or independent validation environments.
• Experience in financial services, mortgage lending, lending operations, servicing, broker channels, third party partnerships, or regulated technology environments is preferred.

Relationships:
External: Engages implementation partners, cloud providers, data and AI platform providers, model providers, and specialist vendors on evaluation methods, independent benchmarking, quality evidence, and knowledge transfer to First National.
Internal: Works within the AI Platform Squad while maintaining assessment independence from the delivery teams whose work it gates.

Working Environment and Physical Demands Analysis:
• Office environment
• Periods of high volume with tight timelines
• Long periods of stationary position/sitting
• Prolonged periods of repetitive movement (i.e. using a keyboard and mouse)
• Long periods of time in viewing a computer screen
• Multi-tasking may include speaking to customers on a telephone call while looking up information on a computer program.

Why join First National?
• Competitive Compensation
• Comprehensive benefits program (i.e., Health Spending Account, Maternity and Parental Leave Top Up)
• Extensive training programs to set our employees up for success
• Modern office environment conducive to collaboration
• Supportive teamwork culture
• Opportunities to give back to the communities and work through events focused on a variety of charities
• Ongoing social events throughout the year

The team you’ll join:
Founded in 1988, First National is one of Canada’s largest non-bank lenders. We provide residential mortgages exclusively through the mortgage broker channel and we are Canada’s largest commercial mortgage lender.
First National has been consistently recognized as a great place to work and we are proud that our employee engagement feedback is higher than our industry partners.

We would like to thank all applications for their interest in this existing vacancy, but only candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.

Artificial Intelligence is not used in our recruitment or hiring process for this role.
First National is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to diversity and inclusion regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, age, gender identity, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation and any other category protected by law.

First National supports requests for accommodation from applicants with disabilities; please contact Human Resources at accessibility@firstnational.ca should you need an accommodation at any point in the recruitment process.

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