AI Software Engineer, Product

Palona AI; Toronto; On-site; CAD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Stock Options

Medical, dental, vision & retirement

Family Leave

Short/Long Term Disability

Paid time off & company holidays

Learning and development support

Job summary

Palona AI in Toronto is hiring a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in production. You will build across customer-facing experiences, backend services, and integrations, owning the quality of the overall experience.

You will collaborate with product, design, and restaurant operators, making fast tradeoffs and delivering production-ready solutions.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production web or platform products.
• Depth in either Python/backend engineering or TypeScript/React frontend engineering, plus ability to work across the full stack.
• Experience building with LLMs, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems beyond a toy prototype.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from problem discovery through launch, measurement, and iteration.
• Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, data models, agent tools, and integrations as one coherent product.
• Design agent workflows that combine models, context, memory, rules, deterministic services, and human escalation.
• Collaborate with restaurant operators and internal users to understand failures and translate feedback into reusable capabilities.
• Integrate with POS, reservation, messaging, telephony, and external systems while handling imperfect data.

Skills

Python backend

TypeScript/React

Full-stack engineering

LLMs/AI systems

Product judgment

Tools

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

React

AWS

LiveKit

Job description

We are looking for a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in the real world. You will build across customer-facing experiences, backend services, agent workflows, integrations, and evaluation systems. The job begins with a customer or product problem and ends when the solution is operating successfully in production—not when a model call works locally.

You may work on voice ordering, reservations, catering, restaurant operations, client configuration, analytics, or entirely new agent capabilities. You will collaborate directly with product, design, customer-facing teams, and restaurant operators; make fast product and technical tradeoffs; and own the quality of the resulting experience.

Our stack includes Python and FastAPI services, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React and Next.js applications, real-time voice agents built with LiveKit, cloud infrastructure on AWS, and modern LLM, speech, and multimodal providers. Exact stack match is less important than full-stack range, product judgment, and a record of shipping.

What you’ll own

• Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from problem discovery and prototype through launch, measurement, and iteration.

• Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, data models, agent tools, and integrations as one coherent product.

• Design agent workflows that combine models, context, memory, business rules, deterministic services, and human escalation.

• Work directly with restaurant and internal users to understand failures, uncover unmet needs, and convert feedback into reusable product capabilities.

• Integrate with POS, reservation, messaging, telephony, and other external systems while handling imperfect data and real operational constraints.

• Build evaluations, instrumentation, guardrails, and feedback loops so probabilistic behavior can be measured and improved.

• Improve latency, reliability, accuracy, usability, and cost across the full experience—not only within one layer of the stack.

• Use AI-native development workflows to prototype and deliver quickly while retaining ownership of architecture, tests, security, and correctness.

• Participate in product and technical planning, make tradeoffs explicit, and drive decisions when the path is ambiguous.

• Raise the quality of nearby systems through code review, documentation, design discussion, and pragmatic refactoring.

• 3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production web or platform products.

• Depth in either Python/backend engineering or TypeScript/React frontend engineering, plus the ability and desire to work effectively across the full stack.

• Experience building with LLMs, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems beyond a toy prototype.

• Product judgment: you can simplify scope, identify the highest-leverage user problem, and distinguish an impressive demo from a valuable product.

• Experience designing APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and integrations with external systems.

• A strong quality bar for testing, observability, security, reliability, and user experience.

• Comfort working directly with users and operating in a fast-changing startup environment.

• AI-native working habits paired with independent technical judgment.

• Competitive Salary and Stock Option Plan.

• Medical, dental, vision, retirement, leave, and disability benefits as applicable.

• Family Leave

• Short Term & Long Term Disability

• Paid time off and company holidays.

• Learning and development support.