Lead Data Scientist - IAA

About IAA

IAA Holdings, LLC (IAA), a Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers company (NYSE: RBA) and (TSX: RBA), is a trusted global marketplace for insights, services, and transaction solutions for commercial assets and vehicles. Leveraging leading-edge technology and focusing on innovation, IAA’s unique platform facilitates the marketing and sale of total-loss, damaged and low-value vehicles. IAA serves a global buyer base – located throughout over 170 countries – and a full spectrum of sellers, including insurers, dealerships, fleet lease and rental car companies, and charitable organizations. Buyers have access to multiple digital bidding and buying channels, innovative vehicle merchandising, and efficient evaluation services, enhancing the overall purchasing experience. IAA offers sellers a comprehensive suite of services aimed at maximizing vehicle value, reducing administrative costs, shortening selling cycle time and delivering the highest economic returns.

About the Role

The Lead Data Scientist will serve as a technical leader in advancing IAA’s Machine Learning (ML) and advanced analytics capabilities. This role involves architecting and building sophisticated ML systems, including supervised, unsupervised, and deep learning models, as well as AI agentic applications, with a strong business orientation and a proven track record of delivering high-impact, data-driven solutions at scale. The Lead Data Scientist will drive the technical vision for machine learning across the organization, implementing scalable solutions that deliver measurable growth and operational efficiency.

Working closely with cross-functional teams within the IAA ecosystem, the Lead Data Scientist will lead the integration of ML and AI solutions into enterprise-scale services. This role requires deep expertise in data best practices and system design to ensure the most appropriate data sources, architectures, and approaches are leveraged to solve complex business problems across customer behavior, vehicle listings, and other business-critical domains.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for data science and ML initiatives across the organization

• Architect and build end-to-end ML systems, from problem framing and data strategy through model development, deployment, and monitoring at scale

• Design and build advanced supervised, unsupervised, and deep learning models, including NLP and computer vision solutions, to solve high-impact business problems

• Develop AI agentic applications and LLM-powered solutions to automate workflows and unlock new capabilities

• Perform feature engineering, data validation, and quality assurance across large, complex datasets

• Partner with data engineering, ML platform, and software engineering teams to productionize models and ensure scalability, reliability, and monitoring

• Translate ambiguous, cross-functional business challenges into well-scoped technical strategies and communicate findings to executive and non-technical stakeholders

• Mentor and elevate staff and senior data scientists, and establish best practices, standards, and technical direction across the data science team

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building and deploying production machine learning systems, including supervised, unsupervised, and deep learning approaches

• Advanced proficiency in Python and SQL, with deep experience in ML libraries such as scikit-learn, PyTorch or TensorFlow, pandas, and NumPy

• Strong hands-on experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computer vision applications

• Hands-on experience building AI agentic applications using LangChain, LangGraph, or similar frameworks, including integration with LLMs and external tools/APIs

• Hands-on experience with the full ML lifecycle: feature engineering, model training, hyperparameter tuning, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring

• Strong foundation in statistics and core ML algorithms (gradient boosting, neural networks, clustering, dimensionality reduction)

• Experience architecting ML solutions on large-scale datasets using distributed computing frameworks (Spark, Dask) and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, influence cross-functional roadmaps, and communicate complex technical strategies to executive stakeholders

• Track record of mentoring senior data scientists and raising the technical bar across a data science organization

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) for building interoperable AI agent integrations across tools, data sources, and enterprise systems

• Experience designing and orchestrating multi-agent AI systems, including tool-use agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and autonomous decision-making workflows

• Familiarity with Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, and Generative AI techniques

• Experience with MLOps practices and CI/CD pipelines for machine learning workflows

• Experience with real-time inference systems and low-latency model serving

• Contributions to open-source projects

Benefits

RB Global full-time employees are offered medical, dental, vision, and basic life insurances. Employees are able to enroll in our company’s 401k plan and RB Global will match 100% for the first 4% contributed. Employees will also receive 15 days of PTO each year.