Senior Data Scientist

Who are we?

Alert Labs is a certified B-Corporation, building technology solutions for good. We help our customers identify and eliminate water waste, water damage, reduce energy consumption, and ultimately lower their environmental impact. You can find our technology in commercial and retail buildings, condos, schools, construction sites, and many other applications across North America.

Did you know? By analyzing water data gathered by our easy-to-use sensors, Alert Labs customers have saved more than 55 billion litres of water and prevented 160,000 tonnes of CO2e from entering the atmosphere.

What kinds of activities will you do on our analytics team?

Join our innovative team as an intermediate or senior Data Scientist and play a pivotal role in elevating our HVAC analytics capabilities to new heights! Help transform noisy, real‑world HVAC sensor data streams into clear, actionable insights for customers. You’ll collaborate with our Mechanical Engineering team to uncover the physics‑based story behind the data, design and validate robust anomaly‑detection algorithms, and deploy them in production to power reliable alerts and diagnostics. Your work will directly improve customer outcomes and support our mission of reducing environmental impact by making home HVAC smarter.

This role is hybrid, with a couple of days per week in our Kitchener (soon to be Waterloo) office. Interviews will be a mix of remote and in-person. Application review will start in the new year.

What you’ll do

• Analyze multivariate time‑series from HVAC systems (e.g., temperature, humidity, pressure, power, vibration) and connect signatures to real fault modes that an HVAC contractor or homeowner can understand and act upon.
• Partner with Mechanical Engineering to model expected system behavior (thermodynamics, heat transfer, psychometrics) and translate physics into features, constraints, and validation procedures.
• Build and validate anomaly‑detection algorithms using statistical and ML techniques; design experiments, benchmarks, and ground‑truthing plans.
• Productionize models with robust data pipelines, monitoring, and drift management; design for reliability, latency, and maintainability.
• Improve alert accuracy with clever ideas: sensor fusion, adaptive thresholds, debouncing, consensus ensembles, confidence scoring, and human‑in‑the‑loop review flows.
• Own data quality: detect/repair missing data, unit inconsistencies, calibration drift, understand and correct data issues that prevent quality analytics.
• Communicate clearly with engineering, peers, and leadership—turn findings into narratives, help recommend strategies and solutions.
• Mentor junior data scientists through code reviews, design docs, and learning sessions; model best practices in analysis and delivery.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher: Mathematics, computer science, software engineering or equivalent
• Experience: 5+ years in data science or equivalent
• Strong mathematics (probability, statistics, linear algebra, optimization) applied to noisy, real‑world sensor data.
• Excellent communication: synthesize complex analyses into insights for technical and non‑technical audiences, and make and defend recommendations
• Machine learning proficiency: neural networks, random forests, gradient boosted trees and other anomaly specific methods
• Creativity in brainstorming, hypothesis generation, and solution creation; comfort balancing research with pragmatic delivery.
• Experience mentoring junior data scientists; lead by example and raise the team’s technical bar.
• Python proficiency (NumPy, Pandas, scikit‑learn; bonus for PyTorch/TF); clean, tested, and reproducible code.
• Source control management or version control software experience (e.g. Git)
• Product mindset: appreciation for how to convert value within the data into actionable customer insights in production systems.

Nice-to-have experience

• Software development: Typescript, Rust, C++...
• Software tools: VSCode, Jupyter notebooks
• Cloud architecture
• Mechanical Engineering, physics or understanding of heat transfer
• Leadership