Applied AI Engineer

Company Description

Citizen is a global PR agency built to unleash the potential of ambitious brands. Integrated teams across PR, creative & strategy, insights & intelligence, digital, and experiential marketing give the curiosity, confidence, and courage to stay ahead of trends, make bold moves, and maximize measurable success.

With 10 offices across North America and Europe, Citizen's client roster includes P&G, Nestlé, Duracell and Nespresso. The agency's disruptive campaigns have been awarded across the world from such shows as The Clios, Webbys, The One Show, LIAs, PRWeek Global and the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.

In 2023 Citizen was named PRovoke Media's Consumer PR Agency of the Year and Best Mid-Size Agency to Work For, in addition to PR Agency of the Year (Gold) from Strategy Magazine, Best Places to Work for PRWeek and Inc. Magazine's "Best in Business". In 2024, Citizen was named Campaign's Global PR Agency of the Year (Bronze). In 2025, Citizen was honoured with Strategy Agency of the Year (Bronze) and recognized in PRNews' 2026 Agency Elite Top 120.

This isn't just a job; it's an opportunity to grow, connect, and belong in a vibrant environment. Beyond global opportunities, personal time, and unforgettable team-bonding, we prioritize professional development, committed to unleashing the potential for our talent across all offices. If you lead with curiosity and are eager to make a lasting impact for the world's biggest brands, you can find out more about us here:

Transparency matters to us. For this role, you can expect a salary between $120,000-$150,000 annually, depending on experience. This is for a new vacancy.

Role Summary

Citizen Relations Canada is building a small, high impact Applied Intelligence capability to transform how we design, execute, and measure integrated communications and marketing programs. We're hiring an applied AI engineer focused on building and operating LLM powered applications and the cloud/platform systems that support them on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

As an Applied AI Engineer, you'll be an early builder with real ownership: you'll design, ship, and run production AI services, with most of your time on application logic and platform reliability, and lighter data responsibilities to support those services. This is a hands on engineering role, not a research position and not a pure data engineering or pure DevOps role.

You'll have meaningful say in the technical choices for the AI workflows and services you own, and are expected to propose and drive improvements-not just implement tickets.

Success in this role looks like Reliable AI workflows in production that materially reduce manual effort for internal teams, and data pipelines that are structured and dependable enough for your services and analytics to rely on.

What You'll Do

• Build and operate LLM powered applications and agents Design, implement, test, and operate LLM powered workflows and agents on Vertex AI that automate existing agency workflows and enable new capabilities for our teams and clients (e.g., research assistants, content helpers, reporting co pilots).
• Own the cloud infrastructure for those AI products Use GCP services (e.g., Cloud Run/Functions, IAM, logging/monitoring) and CI/CD pipelines to deploy, monitor, and scale AI services. Treat reliability, cost, performance, and security as core design constraints, not afterthoughts.
• Integrate data sources into AI workflows (light data work) Use Fivetran, Python, and SQL on BigQuery to connect and prepare marketing performance, market research, and third party data so it's usable inside your AI applications and basic analytics. You support and shape the data your services need, but you're not the primary data warehouse architect.
• Apply solid engineering and DevOps practices Write clean, maintainable Python and SQL; add automated tests where it makes sense; participate in code reviews; version control, and help establish lightweight but real standards for branching, CI/CD, observability, and incident response for AI services.
• Focus on applied LLM work (not research) Work primarily on applied LLM integration: designing prompts, tools, and RAG/agent workflows on Vertex AI and related frameworks. You'll be orchestrating, fine tuning, and evaluating models - not training custom models from scratch.
• Collaborate across disciplines Partner with account, strategy, analytics, and creative teams to understand real agency pain points, translate them into technical designs, and iterate quickly on tools that people actually use in their day to day work.

Must Have Qualifications

• 3-5 years of professional experience as a software, data, or AI engineer using Python and SQL to build and run production systems.
• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related quantitative field.
• Practical experience on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including BigQuery, in a real project.
• Proven track record of shipping multiple real applications or services into production (ideally AI or data heavy) and owning them through monitoring, debugging, and incremental improvement.
• Comfort working across application code and cloud infrastructure, with enough SQL/BigQuery experience to prepare and query data used by your services (without owning the entire data stack).
• Hands on experience building LLM powered workflows using Vertex AI and/or modern agent/RAG frameworks (for example, LangGraph, LangChain, or similar).
• Able to self direct technically using documentation, community best practices, and collaboration with peers; you don't require a hands on tech lead to unblock basic engineering decisions.

Nice to Have Experience

• Deeper experience with Vertex AI (prompt design, evaluation, safety/guardrails, or RAG patterns).
• Background working with marketing analytics, media performance, or market research data.
• Experience with ELT tools such as Fivetran or similar managed connectors.
• Exposure to vector databases and retrieval patterns (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, BigQuery vector search).
• Prior experience in a studio or consulting environment, shipping under real world deadlines and changing priorities.

Why This Role at Citizen Relations Canada

• Apps + platform, not just glue work: You'll build real AI applications and own the key GCP platform pieces around them as well as the AI logic - instead of being stuck only in ETL or only in infra.
• Early builder, high ownership: You'll help shape patterns, libraries, and best practices for how we build AI products-not just follow a playbook someone else wrote.
• Real, visible impact: The tools you build will directly change how strategists, analysts, and creatives pitch, plan, and measure work for major brands, rather than disappearing into an internal platform.
• Applied AI, not AI theater: This role is about shipping and operating working systems that automate real workflows, unlock new insights potential, and drive better decisions-not just prototypes and slideware.

What's in it for you: We value the 'whole you'

• An innovative and entrepreneurial work environment that promotes ingenuity and individuality - with the best of colleagues, and the best of clients.
• Hybrid work models and flexible hours.
• Generous Vacation starting at 3 weeks + 1 extra week over the holidays.
• Agency summer days (exact policy differs per campus and agency).
• Modern, open co working spaces with coffee & snack bars, located in a great city neighborhood, close to shops and restaurants and easy access to public transport.
• Dogs allowed, dedicated Play Room to support families and private wellness room (in select offices).
• Team social events - holiday parties, seasonal gatherings, weekly happy hours, inspiring speakers and more!

We are obsessed with learning and being better humans

• In house learning & development sessions and annual career and growth conversations.
• Access to internal network of opportunities across all agencies.
• Internal EDI group(s), programs & initiatives across Plus Company and opportunities to be involved in employee resource group(s).

Check out our EDI report here to learn more about our work and commitment towards equity.

Health & Wellness Benefits

• Flexible benefits to support your individual lifestyle and life stage - with access to a personal wellness spending account you can use for a wide range of wellness expenses, including gym membership fees, pet care, education expenses, and much more!
• Comprehensive mental health support including access to a virtual mental health therapy clinic providing you with personalized therapist guided iCBT programs and live therapy, access to health clinicians 24/7, and a holistic array of other health and wellness resources to support you and your family.
• Dedicated play rooms for days you need to bring the kids and health and wellness rooms when you need a place to get grounded.
• A responsible sick & personal absence days policy designed so you don't have to worry the moment a personal obligation or emergency arises.
• Maternity leave top up program.

Expiry Date Notice: This job description expires on May 15th, 2026.