Agentic Engineer, Innovation

The Agentic Engineer, Innovation will design, build, and scale agentic AI solutions for Canada AI, helping translate high-value innovation opportunities into secure, reusable, and production-ready capabilities on Manulife’s Global AI Platform.

In this role, you will create intelligent agents that reason, plan, retrieve information, connect with enterprise systems, and automate complex business workflows. You will work closely with Product, Data Science, MLOps, Technology, Risk, and Global AI Platform teams to move solutions from prototype to controlled pilot and scalable production deployment.

Position Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize AI agents and multi-agent systems that support reasoning, planning, retrieval, workflow automation, and task execution.

• Develop agentic workflows using LLMs, RAG, APIs, tools, enterprise knowledge sources, memory, orchestration, and decision-making capabilities.

• Rapidly prototype, test, and refine proofs of concept and MVPs that demonstrate measurable business value and can scale beyond experimentation.

• Build predictive, generative, and agentic AI solutions using sound machine learning, evaluation, and analytics practices.

• Engineer reusable, platform-ready components, prompts, connectors, orchestration patterns, evaluation flows, and knowledge integrations.

• Align solutions to Manulife’s Global AI Platform architecture, tooling, deployment patterns, governance standards, and approved engineering practices.

• Operationalize AI solutions with testing, observability, monitoring, reliability controls, documentation, and clear handoff requirements.

• Support onboarding of priority Canada AI use cases to the Global AI Platform through discovery, fit-gap assessment, remediation, and readiness activities.

• Contribute reusable reference architectures, code patterns, evaluation methods, playbooks, and development standards.

• Ensure solutions meet Responsible AI, security, privacy, compliance, model risk, governance, and monitoring requirements.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, or a related field.

• Hands-on experience developing machine learning, generative AI, or agentic AI solutions in enterprise environments using governed, reusable delivery patterns.

• Strong Python and SQL skills, with experience in AI application architecture, orchestration, retrieval, prompt design, evaluation, integration, and production monitoring.

• Experience with LLMs, RAG, vector search, embedding models, agent frameworks, API integration, cloud-native development, CI/CD, and MLOps/LLMOps practices.

• Ability to build secure, scalable, platform-ready AI solutions while collaborating with architecture, MLOps, product, risk, and business stakeholder teams.

• Bilingualism in English and French is an asset. If the successful candidate is in Québec, proficiency in both languages will be required to support clients from various provinces outside of Québec.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing, evaluating, and monitoring production-grade AI agents or agentic workflows on an enterprise AI platform.

• Strong understanding of Responsible AI, model governance, security review, risk management, and production approval processes in regulated environments.

• Experience building reusable enterprise AI capabilities such as copilots, workflow automation, component libraries, InnerSource assets, and shared engineering patterns.

• Experience moving prototypes or locally built AI solutions to enterprise platforms, with exposure to SRE practices, observability, incident response, and production readiness.

• Familiarity with Azure, AKS, PostgreSQL, Key Vault, graph and vector databases, agent orchestration, automated red teaming, LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation, Akka SDK patterns, Java syntax, or financial services environments.

When you join our team

• We’ll empower you to learn and grow the career you want.

• We’ll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.

• As part of our global team, we’ll support you in shaping the future you want to see.

The role being advertised is an existing vacancy.

About Manulife and John Hancock

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, helping people make their decisions easier and lives better. To learn more about us, visit https://www.manulife.com/en/about/our-story.html.

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process. All information shared during the accommodation request process will be stored and used in a manner that is consistent with applicable laws and Manulife/John Hancock policies. To request a reasonable accommodation in the application process, contact hr@manulife.com.

Referenced Salary Location

Montreal, QuebecHybrid

Salary range is expected to be between

$94,430.00 CAD - $144,430.00 CAD

Employees also have the opportunity to participate in incentive programs and earn incentive compensation tied to business and individual performance. The actual salary will vary depending on local market conditions, geography and relevant job-related factors such as knowledge, skills, qualifications, experience, and education/training. If you are applying for this role outside of the primary location, please contact hr@manulife.com for the salary range for your location.

Manulife offers eligible employees a wide array of customizable benefits, including health, dental, mental health, vision, short- and long-term disability, life and AD&D insurance coverage, adoption/surrogacy and wellness benefits, and employee/family assistance plans. We also offer eligible employees various retirement savings plans (including pension and a global share ownership plan with employer matching contributions) and financial education and counseling resources. Our generous paid time off program in Canada includes holidays, vacation, personal, and sick days, and we offer the full range of statutory leaves of absence. If you are applying for this role in the U.S., please contact hr@manulife.com for more information about U.S.-specific paid time off provisions.

We use data and analytics technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and automated processing tools, to analyze and process the information you provide to us or third parties in the application process. For more information, please refer to our personal information collection statement.