Lead Data Scientist - Canada - Contract

(Remote – Canada)
About Very
Very is a fully distributed technology firm led by expert problem-solvers who create efficient, scalable solutions that move commercial, industrial, and consumer products from pilot to production in record time.
We believe that real innovation happens in the grind, working shoulder to shoulder with clients who are building the future. Our team thrives on that energy. When we're not helping clients deliver business-critical outcomes, we're refining our craft and celebrating what it means to do hard things well.
We've built a collaborative, tight-knit culture that thrives in both remote and in-person settings. We've won numerous workplace awards over the years, including Great Place to Work certification and recognition from Parity.org as a Best Company for Women to Advance.
Our clients include well-known brands like Vizio, Peloton, Clear, iHeart Radio, and Fellowes, all determined to leverage connected devices and AI to drive meaningful impact. Our job is simple: help them win.
About This Role
A Lead at Very is an individual who operates with the highest degree of knowledge and accountability for the delivery of services to our customers. They provide excellent technical leadership and delivery skills, as it pertains to complex, multi-faceted projects at Very. They have a strong executive presence, which gives major client stakeholders the confidence that we will deliver, and gives our team the confidence and accountability to do so.
As a Lead Data Scientist at Very, you own the data and modeling workstream on client engagements. You will be handed a vague client outcome and a small budget, and expected to independently decide the architecture, the evaluation design, and what to tell the client. You make architecture calls, defend them internally, present results directly to non-technical owners, and recognize when the highest-leverage next step is a change to the data or approach rather than further tuning.
The work is roughly 30 percent modeling, 30 percent data and infrastructure plumbing, and 40 percent client-facing judgment. This is not a research role. The people who succeed here are as comfortable owning a data pipeline end to end as they are training a model.
Lead engineers also serve as solutions engineers for the commercial team, helping close contracts with terms that are conducive to successful delivery.
This is not an easy role. You'll work in complex domains, under real deadlines, and with clients who expect you to bring clarity, confidence, and results. If you find satisfaction in doing hard things well, in solving tough problems, building real systems, and helping others rise to the challenge, you'll fit right in.
As a client services organization, travel may be required up to 10% of the time.
What You'll Be Working On
Almost all of our projects are production systems. Recent engagements have included two representative shapes of work:
Applied computer vision on physical-world measurement problems. Turning raw video into labeled training datasets, training and evaluating vision models against noisy real-world ground truth, standing up cost-aware hosted inference for large models, and translating error metrics into plain business language for a client who thinks in dollars, not RMSE.
Agentic data platforms. Ingesting unreliable public or client data into a well-designed relational schema, building hybrid lexical and semantic retrieval, exposing typed tool interfaces to LLMs, and defending the correctness of every answer to technically curious stakeholders who test the system adversarially.
These two shapes are representative, not exhaustive; the exact nature of your projects will vary. Across our engagements, we typically leverage the following:

Core: Python at a production engineering level, PyTorch, the SciPy stack, Git and GitHub Actions, agentic AI development (MCP servers, LLM APIs, typed tool design)

Data and backend: PostgreSQL including full text search and pgvector, Python web frameworks such as Django or FastAPI, Docker, and Celery and Redis for job orchestration that scales to zero between bursts

ML lifecycle: MLflow or Weights and Biases for experiment tracking, labeling platforms with API-driven upload, speech-to-text pipelines (Whisper), Jupyter for prototyping

AWS: SageMaker, Fargate, ECR/ECS, Lambda, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, IAM, Bedrock, IoT Core, Greengrass

Infrastructure-as-Code: Pulumi and Terraform

Edge: Embedded inference on NVIDIA Jetson, RPi, or ESP32; OpenCV; streaming pipelines

You will collaborate closely with our software, hardware, and design teams, so enough full-stack literacy to integrate a model into a running web application is expected.
We value well-tested, reusable code and expect our engineers to be as good practitioners as they are leaders and teachers.
Responsibilities

Work with clients, sales, engineers, and designers to define and estimate Statements of Work, including assumptions, risks, and dependencies

Own the data science components of an engagement end to end, from architecture through production and monitoring

Design the evaluation, not just report a metric: validation strategies that reflect how the system will actually be used, metrics appropriate to the problem, and for search systems, a labeled set of test questions with known answers so retrieval precision and recall can be measured and regressions caught

Own the correctness story of the systems you build: auditability, reproducibility, reconciliation against source, and traceability from any answer back to the underlying record

Architect, build, and deploy reliable data, retrieval, and ML pipelines into production

Present model and system results directly to non-technical clients in plain language, without jargon or over-promising

Push back on a bad idea from the client and offer a better path at the same time

Scope and estimate your own work in hours, and hold to that time box

Raise uncomfortable findings early, including when better data quantity or quality, or a different strategy altogether, is required

Write clearly: short summaries, model reports, schema documentation, and repos another engineer can run

Mentor senior engineers and review others' work, catching flawed experimental design and training configurations before they reach production

Establish and enact DataOps and MLOps best practices, and continue to evolve the Data Solutions practice at Very

Minimum Qualifications
Education
Master's degree in Data Science, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field. A PhD or equivalent research training is a strong signal but not required

Experience

5+ years of related experience, including a shipped model or data system that real users depend on

Python at an expert engineering level: production services, packaging, testing, code review, and the discipline to hand work to another engineer

Applied computer vision end to end: modern vision architectures (transformer-based and CNN backbones), a range of task heads, and transfer learning mechanics (fine-tuning strategies, learning rate schedules, regularization, early stopping)

Evaluation and experimental rigor: train/validation/test methodology that avoids leakage, diagnosing systematic error patterns, justifying metric choice for the problem at hand, and disciplined experiment tracking

Deep PostgreSQL: schema design for a messy real-world domain, indexing and query performance, full text search, and pgvector

Data engineering over unreliable sources: bulk acquisition, normalization, idempotent and incremental loads, and reconciliation against a source you do not control

Dataset construction, not just consumption: building datasets from raw source material, preserving traceability back to source, working with labeling platforms, and joining outputs to messy real-world ground truth

Retrieval systems, lexical and semantic: chunking strategy, embedding selection, hybrid retrieval and rank fusion

LLM application engineering: MCP or equivalent tool interfaces with typed and validated parameters, grounding, citation of underlying records, and hallucination control

AWS as a delivery target: SageMaker training jobs, GPU instance selection and cost awareness, Fargate, RDS, S3, and hosted inference endpoints that a live application calls

Infrastructure-as-Code (Pulumi or Terraform) and GitHub Actions CI/CD

Led cross-functional engineering teams, and partnered with sales and client success to secure and grow work

Strong written and spoken communication skills in English

Nice to Haves

7+ years of related experience

Azure experience: Functions, Container Registry/Instances, SQL Database, Machine Learning, IoT Hub

Classical CV and object detection alongside deep learning

Multi-frame, temporal, video, or pose estimation models

Managed authentication and JWT validation patterns

Prior consulting or agency delivery experience with fixed-price, fixed-scope work

AWS Professional level certification

Requirements

Must reside in Canada

Must be legally authorized to operate as an independent contractor in Canada

Skills

In addition to experience, these are the critical skills we look for in all technical roles, and how they should be demonstrated at the Lead level.

Client Obsessed: Keeps the client's success front and center. Measures technical choices by their business impact.

Communicates Effectively: Expert communicator who informs, engages, and aligns diverse audiences.

Sets the Bar: Holds themselves and others to exceptionally high technical and delivery standards.

Thrives in the Grind: Finds energy and satisfaction in complex, high-stakes work, and helps others do the same.

Leads Through Complexity: Brings clarity and direction when projects are messy, high-pressure, or uncertain.

Compensation
Compensation is based on internal leveling during the interview process.
If deemed a Lead, compensation is CAD $100 per hour.
Contract
This role is structured as an independent contractor engagement, as an ad-hoc hourly contract. It is not a full-time employee position, and employee benefits such as group RRSP matching, extended health coverage, and equipment or education stipends are not included.
Though this role is structured as a contract engagement, the scope of work is substantial and may approximate a full-time workload depending on the contractor's pace and approach.
You must have access to your own computer/device and reliable internet.
Why Work for Very
We do not promise an easy ride, we promise meaningful work.
We work hard because our clients' success depends on it, and we take pride in delivering when others can't. We collaborate closely, move fast, and stay grounded in results. We take joy in the process, in the problem-solving, the iteration, and the shared wins that come from doing the hard things well.
If you're looking for a place where every project matters, where the standards are high, and where you'll grow by pushing yourself and others, welcome to Very.
IMPORTANT:

We don't currently provide Visa Sponsorship. Don't apply if you require this.

This job is remote but if you're not located in the region or country mentioned in the post's title, do not continue. Your application won't be reviewed.

Interviewing for a new company is a serious time commitment for all parties involved. Please take the time to read this and thoughtfully consider if we would be a good fit for one another. No agencies or recruiters. Seriously.
The region/country on the post's title is not related to the location of the clients you'll be serving. It's a reference to the place of residence of the applicant! All of Very's clients are North America-based.
Originally posted on Himalayas