Director, AI Initiatives, Canadian Operations

You are as unique as your background, experience and point of view. Here, you’ll be encouraged, empowered and challenged to be your best self. You'll work with dynamic colleagues - experts in their fields - who are eager to share their knowledge with you. Your leaders will inspire and help you reach your potential and soar to new heights. Every day, you'll have new and exciting opportunities to make life brighter for our Clients - who are at the heart of everything we do.

Discover how you can make a difference in the lives of individuals, families and communities around the world.

Sun Life Canada is on an exciting journey of innovation and transformation to deepen our commitment to our One Sun purpose “To help clients achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives”. Sun Life Canada Operations includes a team of over 5,000 dedicated team members across Canada and SL Global Solutions in Asia. We support client onboarding, processing, and service delivery across Sun Life’s Canadian business.

Our team handles over 130 million interactions with Clients, plan sponsors and advisors annually, putting clients at the centre of everything we do.

Reporting to the AVP, Transformation, Key Initiatives & Change, the Director, AI Initiatives, Canadian Operations will lead the development and implementation of AI strategies to drive innovation, efficiency, and transformation across the Canadian Operations. This role will partner closely with the Canadian Operations Leadership Team (COLT), the Data COE and other senior leaders to proactively identify and prioritize high impact opportunities where AI can be a strategic differentiation, unlocking competitive advantage and driving measurable business outcomes and operational efficiencies.

• Develop and execute a comprehensive Canadian Operations’ AI strategy aligned with Sun Life's business objectives
• Identify emerging AI trends and assess their potential impact on Canadian operations
• Develop and maintain a roadmap for AI initiatives, ensuring a balanced portfolio of short term wins and long-term strategic projects

• Partner with Data Science COE, COLT, and cross-functional teams to ensure seamless integration of AI solutions. Identify, prioritize and oversee high-impact Gen AI use cases.
• Engage with external partners, vendors, and academic institutions for cutting-edge AI research and development
• Support change management as AI initiatives move from proof of concept (POC) to implementation/business as usual (BAU)
• Collaborate with other areas of SL to share learnings, identify synergies and leverage best practices in AI implementation
• Act as a liaison between technical teams and business stakeholders, translating complex AI concepts into business value propositions

• Ensure all AI initiatives comply with data privacy regulations and ethical standards – including OSFI E-23 and ISO 42001
• Establish governance frameworks for AI systems and machine learning models

• Proficient with ML concepts including bagging and boosting techniques, common algorithms like XGBoost, Decision Tree and Deep Learning concepts including RNN and CNN
• Experience with multi-cloud AI services AWS Sage Maker, Lambda, Bedrock, and Azure Co-pilot Studio and Agent Foundry
• Comfortable with common AI data structures including star and snowflake schemas
• Demonstrated experience in data transformation, data manipulation, and working with structured vs. unstructured data
• Strong understanding of APIs, MCPs, microservices architecture, and cloud-native development
• Hands‑on expertise with GenAI frameworks and LLM APIs with experience developing AI bots/agents with reasoning and tool‑use capabilities
• Strong understanding of RAG techniques, prompt engineering, and fine‑tuning methodologies and familiarity with vector databases and embedding models
• Exposure to Agentic frameworks including Lang Chain, Lang Graph and CrewAI

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, AI, or equivalent
• 5+ years of experience in AI and Data product…