Senior Manager, Data & AI Platforms

About Us

SSENSE is a global technology platform operating at the intersection of culture, community, and commerce. Headquartered in Montreal, it features a mix of established and emerging luxury brands across womenswear, menswear, kidswear, and Everything Else.

SSENSE has garnered critical acclaim as both an e-commerce engine and a producer of cultural content, generating an average of 100 million monthly page views.

About the Role

As Senior Manager, Data & AI Platforms, you will play a key role in SSENSE's ambition to move towards an AI Native culture within our core technical engine. You will lead and develop the Data & AI Development teams, setting and operationalizing departmental strategy and end-to-end platform roadmaps to sustain hyper-growth and power resilient digital experiences. Partnering across engineering, you will deliver core enterprise capabilities—including internal LLM gateways, vector databases, agentic workflows, and knowledge layers—while driving alignment across governance, infrastructure, and automation. In this role, you will act as a guardian of our digital ecosystem, providing leadership with clear visibility into progress, budget, and risk while driving org-wide change management for AI adoption.

What You Will Do

• Lead & Develop Engineering Talent: Lead, manage, and grow Data & AI Developers, setting direction, facilitating Agile/Scrum activities, and owning team delivery, performance, and talent growth.
• Own the End-to-End Platform Roadmap: Establish realistic timelines, resource plans, and dependency maps across parallel workstreams spanning Governance, Platform Infrastructure, Enablement, Change Management, Data, and AI Automation.
• Deliver Enterprise AI Infrastructure: Partner with engineering teams to define, drive, and deliver core capabilities, including internal LLM gateways, vector databases, agentic workflows, and knowledge layers.
• Ensure Production System Health: Own the reliability, monitoring, incident response, and performance of production data pipelines, ML pipelines, custom data science models, and software products.
• Support AI Operations & Risk Management: Contribute to the platform's risk and decision registry to help identify and unblock critical issues, and support the adoption of native AI and LLM tools in daily program rituals to facilitate progress synthesis, documentation, and planning.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (MBA or Master's degree considered an asset).
• Minimum 7 years of relevant experience, including direct management of engineering teams and proven experience in driving roadmaps for complex initiatives.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in both French and English.
• Fundamental understanding of system design, enterprise AI infrastructure, ML system design, and complex data architecture (multi-source data models, compute cost optimization, scalable pipelines).
• Proficiency in Agile/DevOps frameworks (CI/CD pipelines, user stories, Scrum roles/Product Owner) and familiarity with governance concepts (data classification, risk prioritization, model registries).

What Sets You Apart

• Technical Strategy & Vision: You excel at designing technical plans for complex systems, evaluating short-term solutions against long-term architectural health to build scalable and sustainable solutions.
• Critical Thinking & Problem-Solving: You objectively evaluate key variables to make logical decisions, resolving critical operational and technical roadblocks.
• Guardian of Trusted Data Management: You act as a discreet guardian of data integrity and security, designing processes that automatically generate high-quality training data for business use cases.
• Autonomous Program Design: You demonstrate autonomous leadership for multi-faceted initiatives, easily managing long-term cross-functional dependencies while mentoring and growing project leads.
• AI-Native Pioneer Mindset: You practice what you preach by implementing agentic workflows and integrating AI tools into your daily rituals, setting the standard for enterprise-wide adoption.
• Drive AI Enablement & Change Management: You collaborate with program leadership to measure usage across business units, proactively address adoption barriers, and optimize change management strategies for maximum enterprise impact.

Why Join Us

• Comprehensive health and dental benefits, including mental health programs and coverage.
• Parental leave program.
• Generous discount for employees on ssense.com.
• Access to telemedicine and employee/family assistance program.
• Matching contributions to retirement and savings plans.
• Gender affirmation coverage.
• Opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and an innovative team pushing the boundaries of technology.

*SSENSE is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. If you require any accommodations, please let us know. We will do our best to accommodate you!*