Who You'll Work With
Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward.
In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we'll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you'll receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.
When you join us, you will have:
- Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
- A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
- Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
- World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.
Your Impact
As a Data Scientist II, you will collaborate with clients and interdisciplinary teams to design and deliver advanced analytics and AI solutions that address complex business challenges across industries. In this hands-on role, you'll own analytical workstreams with increasing independence, contribute to cutting-edge projects, and deepen your expertise across a breadth of industries and technologies.
You will translate business challenges into analytical problems, selecting the right approaches based on available data, business value, and solution requirements. You’ll independently develop and evaluate solutions across machine learning, optimization, GenAI, and agentic AI systems, ensuring your work meets rigorous standards for data quality and evaluation and that solutions are robust, scalable, and fit for purpose.
Your work will create measurable impact on some of the most complex challenges facing organizations today. Collaborating across McKinsey's QuantumBlack and QuantumBlack Labs teams, you'll help clients harness advanced analytics and AI to improve decisions, transform operations, and build new capabilities. Here’s how you might contribute in a given year:
- Develop an agentic AI solution that automates complex claims workflows for a global insurance company
- Optimize the schedule and funding of a multi-billion-dollar capital project to accelerate delivery
- Leverage predictive modeling and agentic AI to improve customer service outcomes for a global travel company
- Build a digital twin of an automotive supply chain to enhance product availability
You'll be based in Toronto as part of our global Data Science community. Working in cross-functional teams, you’ll collaborate with data scientists, data engineers, software engineers, and industry experts, and partner with clients from technical teams to C-level executives. Through these experiences, you’ll strengthen your ability to connect technical decisions with business needs and grow as a client-facing technologist.
This role offers a unique opportunity to grow at the forefront of AI and data science. You’ll build expertise at the intersection of technology and business, deepen your understanding of how AI solutions move from problem definition through development, evaluation, and implementation, and learn alongside leading technologists and AI practitioners.
In accordance with Ontario law:
This job posting is for an existing vacancy.
Artificial intelligence systems (AI) may be used to assist recruiters in the screening and/or assessment of candidates for this role. AI is neither the sole determinative factor at any stage of the application process nor the decision-maker. All AI-generated assessments are reviewed by a McKinsey recruiter before any decision is made regarding a candidate’s candidacy.
Your Qualifications and Skills
- Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in computer science, machine learning, applied statistics, mathematics, engineering, artificial intelligence, or a related field
- 2-5 years of professional experience applying machine learning, statistical modeling, optimization, or GenAI techniques to real business problems; proficiency in Python and SQL is required, including the Python AI stack
- Strong foundations in machine learning and statistical modeling, with the ability to independently select, build, and evaluate models for complex problems and a curiosity for emerging analytical methods
- Exposure to optimization, simulation, or decision logic, with the ability to translate analytical outputs into recommended actions
- Familiarity with Generative AI tools and agentic AI frameworks, with practical experience applying these to automate tasks and refine outputs
- A quality and risk mindset takes ownership of validating their own work, documents assumptions and limitations clearly, and thinks carefully about fairness, explainability, and the appropriate use of AI
- Follows software development and MLOps/LLMOps best practices independently, with growing familiarity with CI/CD and agentic engineering concepts
- Strong communication skills, both verbal and written, in English and local office language(s), with the ability to adjust your style to suit different perspectives and seniority levels.
- Exceptional time management to meet your responsibilities in a complex and largely autonomous work environment.
- Willingness to travel
