AI GROWTH BUILDER

We are a startup vibe work culture, where we are highly ambitious to grow fast and big. Keep reading only if that kind of environment interests you. If you are looking for a highly structured, large enterprise, this is not the right position.

We are looking for an AI Growth Builder who is genuinely excited about where artificial intelligence is going and wants to spend their time figuring out how to put it to work to grow a high potential startup in the public sector.

This is not a traditional software developer role and it is not an AI research position.

We are looking for someone who experiments with AI because they are naturally curious about it. You probably follow new models, agents, tools, frameworks, and capabilities as they emerge. You test things yourself. You build things nobody asked you to build. You see repetitive work and immediately start wondering whether it could be automated.

Your job will be to explore what is becoming possible with AI and turn the strongest opportunities into practical tools, workflows, agents, automations, and software used inside Talos.

But this role is not only about internal efficiency.

You will also help us figure out how AI and technology can create new business, strengthen our services, uncover opportunities, and contribute to revenue growth.

You will work directly with leadership and our software team, initially focusing heavily on our training division, TrueTraining.ca.

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OTTAWA / GATINEAU WORK ARRANGEMENT

This posting is intended for candidates based in the Ottawa/Gatineau region.

The position will initially be work from home while Talos expands its physical presence into Ontario.

This is a short term arrangement and the role is not intended to remain remote.

Once our Ottawa office is established, you will be expected to transition into an in person role working alongside our team.

Candidates should apply with the expectation that they will be able to regularly work from our future Ottawa office.

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WHY THIS OPPORTUNITY IS DIFFERENT

Most technology roles give you an established system and ask you to improve one part of it.

This role starts earlier.

You will help Talos / TrueTraining determine what is now possible because of AI.

That could mean:

- Building an agent that completes part of an operational process
- Connecting an LLM to company data
- Giving an internal system the ability to reason over documents
- Automating work currently completed manually
- Testing whether a new model can solve a problem that was not practical 6 months ago
- Building an internal AI tool from scratch
- Connecting software, APIs, databases, and AI into a new workflow
- Rapidly prototyping an idea to determine whether it deserves further investment
- Building a prototype that helps demonstrate a new capability to a prospective client
- Finding a new AI enabled service that Talos could offer commercially

We already have real operations, company data, internal software, a development team, and workflows across training, technology, staffing, and the public sector. We are Indigenous-owned which further enables high success rates, thereby guaranteeing you a spot amongst a high growth company.

You will have real problems to solve, real users to build for, and real business opportunities to pursue.

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THE QUICK SUMMARY

You will find useful ways to apply AI across the team and turn the strongest opportunities into operational or commercial value. You will:

- Identify work that AI could perform better, faster, or differently
- Build prototypes quickly
- Connect AI with company data and existing systems
- Build agents and automated workflows
- Work with APIs, databases, integrations, and internal applications
- Test whether AI outputs are actually accurate and useful
- Turn successful experiments into reliable operational systems
- Identify AI capabilities that could strengthen or expand our services
- Help create tools and systems that improve business development
- Support opportunities that could lead to new clients, projects, pilots, or revenue
- Share discoveries, risks, and opportunities with leadership and the software team

You do not need to arrive knowing how to build everything.

You do need to be unusually good at figuring things out.

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AI + BUSINESS GROWTH

A meaningful part of this role is helping Talos / TrueTraining grow.

We are not looking for someone who only waits for internal technical requirements.

You should be interested in understanding the business, our clients, the public sector, and where technology could create commercial opportunities.

That could include:

- Identifying problems Talos could solve for existing or prospective clients
- Exploring AI capabilities that could become new services or strengthen existing ones
- Building prototypes, demonstrations, and pilots for prospective opportunities
- Participating in selected client and prospect conversations
- Helping translate client problems into possible technical solutions
- Researching organizations, markets, procurement opportunities, and emerging needs
- Using AI to improve prospect research, lead generation, opportunity analysis, and follow up
- Helping improve proposals, presentations, demonstrations, and business development materials




- Building internal tools that make our business development team more effective
- Identifying capabilities Talos could package, scale, or sell across multiple clients
- Bringing potential revenue opportunities to leadership without waiting to be asked

You do not need to be a traditional salesperson.

You do need to understand that great technology only matters to the business when it creates meaningful value.

That could mean saving significant time internally.

It could also mean helping Talos win a new client, launch a new service, expand an existing relationship, or pursue an opportunity we otherwise would not have seen.

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WHAT YOU WILL OWN

You will have significant freedom to investigate AI opportunities throughout the company.

Your work may include:

- Testing new models and understanding what they are actually good at
- Building agents that complete multi step tasks
- Creating AI powered workflows and automations
- Connecting large language models with internal company information
- Working with APIs and external services
- Building lightweight applications and internal tools
- Experimenting with Model Context Protocol and emerging AI infrastructure
- Working with databases and company data
- Comparing models for accuracy, reliability, speed, and cost
- Finding failure cases and improving system behaviour
- Building evaluations to determine whether something actually works
- Designing human review and escalation where appropriate
- Working with developers when an experiment needs deeper engineering
- Demonstrating promising ideas to leadership
- Turning successful prototypes into operational tools
- Exploring commercial applications for technology we develop
- Supporting business development where technical thinking can create an advantage

You should be the type of person who encounters a tool, API, business opportunity, or technical problem you have never seen before and starts figuring it out rather than waiting for someone to teach you.

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BUILD FAST. DEPLOY CAREFULLY.

We expect you to prototype aggressively.

Many ideas should be tested quickly. Some will work. Some will fail. Some should be abandoned within hours.

That is part of the job.

Once something proves valuable enough to enter real operations or be put in front of a client, the standard changes.

Accuracy, security, privacy, reliability, access controls, monitoring, maintainability, documentation, and failure handling matter.

The goal is not to produce impressive demonstrations.

The goal is to discover useful capabilities quickly and turn the right ones into systems, services, and opportunities people can actually rely on.

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WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

Strong performance means Talos is continuously discovering and implementing useful applications of AI while becoming better at turning technology into business value.

Success looks like:

- Current AI capabilities are tested quickly instead of being discussed for months
- Good ideas become working prototypes
- Strong prototypes become tools used by real employees
- Manual work is reduced through intelligent automation
- Existing systems become more capable because AI is integrated into them
- AI systems securely use relevant company information
- Experiments have clear measures of whether they worked
- Outputs are tested rather than assumed to be correct
- Failed ideas are identified quickly
- Useful discoveries are shared across the software team
- Leadership understands which new AI capabilities could materially affect Talos
- New client facing applications and service opportunities are identified
- Technology helps strengthen proposals, demonstrations, pilots, and client conversations
- Your work contributes to meaningful business development opportunities and revenue growth
- The company becomes progressively better at using AI as the technology evolves

Leadership should be able to bring you a problem and expect you to investigate whether AI can meaningfully solve it.

Just as importantly, you should regularly bring opportunities to leadership that nobody asked you to investigate.

That includes both technical opportunities and business opportunities.

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WHO WILL DO WELL HERE

This role is built for someone who genuinely likes AI.

Not because it is popular.

Because you find the technology interesting enough that you are already experimenting with it.

You may be someone who:

- Regularly tests recent AI products and models
- Follows developments in agents, LLMs, multimodal AI, coding agents, automation, and emerging tooling
- Gets curious when a new model or capability is released
- Has built something simply because you wanted to know whether it was possible
- Uses AI extensively in your own work
- Constantly looks for better ways to accomplish things
- Learns technical concepts independently
- Is comfortable opening documentation and figuring things out




- Likes solving poorly defined problems
- Moves quickly from an idea to something testable
- Can recognize when exciting technology is not actually useful
- Takes responsibility for getting to a working result
- Is interested in how technology creates business value
- Can comfortably speak with both technical and nontechnical people
- Is willing to participate in client facing and business development activities
- Notices opportunities without needing someone else to point them out
- Is comfortable working in a startup style environment

Formal experience matters less to us than evidence that you can learn, experiment, build, solve problems, and create value.

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THE TECHNICAL BAR

Using ChatGPT heavily is not enough.

You should be capable of building with AI, not just using AI products.

That may include experience building:

- AI agents
- Automations
- API integrations
- Internal tools
- Web applications
- AI powered workflows
- Retrieval systems
- Model integrations
- Data pipelines
- Software that uses LLM APIs

Experience with some of the following would be valuable:

- OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or similar model APIs
- Tool calling and structured outputs
- Model Context Protocol
- Retrieval augmented generation
- AI evaluations
- JavaScript or TypeScript
- Python
- APIs
- SQL and relational databases
- Microsoft Azure
- Azure Functions
- Azure AI
- GitHub
- Cloud services

Software development experience is valuable, but we are not specifically looking for someone who has spent 10 years as a traditional developer.

Someone who has spent the last few years aggressively teaching themselves how to build with AI may be more interesting to us than someone with significantly more conventional experience.

What you have actually built will carry significant weight.

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WHAT WE WILL CARE ABOUT IN THE INTERVIEW

Expect us to be more interested in what you have explored, built, and identified than whether you can recite AI terminology.

We will want to understand:

- What AI tools and models you currently use
- What you have built with them
- What you experimented with recently
- Which developments in AI you think are genuinely important
- How you approach a technical problem you have never encountered before
- How you determine whether an AI system is actually reliable
- What you would automate if you joined Talos / TrueTraining
- What AI capabilities you think businesses are currently underestimating
- How you would determine whether an idea could create commercial value
- How comfortable you are speaking with prospective clients about their problems
- What you think AI will make possible over the next few years

If you have personal projects, prototypes, GitHub repositories, agents, automations, or strange experiments you built because you were curious, we want to see them.

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THE BOTTOM LINE

This role is for someone who sees a new AI capability and immediately starts wondering what they could build with it.

You will experiment.

You will connect systems.

You will test ideas that fail.

You will build AI to grow the business.

And occasionally, you will find something that fundamentally changes how part of the company operates or creates an entirely new opportunity for Talos.

Those are the opportunities we want you looking for.

We are not looking for someone who simply knows how to use ChatGPT.

We are looking for someone who is intensely curious about what AI can do, technically capable enough to explore it, commercially aware enough to understand where it creates value, and resourceful enough to turn that curiosity into working systems and business opportunities.

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ABOUT US

Talos exists to strengthen the people and systems that shape a country. We are a Canadian company headquartered in Victoria, BC, serving government clients across training, technology, talent, and public sector operations. Much of our work operates around the Eastern Time Zone because of our clients and growing presence in Ottawa and Gatineau.

Our team is ambitious, energetic, and comfortable solving problems without waiting for someone else to provide the answer.

We work with the public sector across:

- Virtual training
- IT hardware and software
- Recruitment and headhunting
- Public sector operations support
- Technology and workflow improvement

From building secure technology systems to providing specialized staffing and running nationwide virtual learning programs, Talos designs reliable, human centered systems that help keep public sector operations strong and adaptable.

The belief behind Talos is simple: stronger public servants create stronger institutions, and stronger institutions shape a stronger country.

Pay: $81,000.00-$176,000.00 per year

Benefits:

- Casual dress
- Dental care
- Extended health care
- On-site parking
- Vision care
- Wellness program

Application question(s):

- Tell us about the most interesting thing you have built with AI that nobody asked you to build. What did it do, how did you build it, and what did you learn?
- What is something unique about AI that most businesses might not know about, but should?
- Are you confident you can build something cool alongside us with AI?
- What is 1 thing that makes you unique?
- What is your preferred $ hourly rate or annual salary?

Work Location: In person

📌 AI Growth Builder (Canada)
🏢 TrueTraining u002F Talos
📍 Canada