Engineering Lead

Opus; Burnaby; Hybrid; CAD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

Flexible PTO

Equipment budget

Visa sponsorship available

Job summary

OpusClip in Burnaby, BC, is hiring an Engineering Lead to be the senior engineering leader for our Burnaby office. You will own the output of a ~10-person team spanning growth engineering, B2B delivery, DevOps/SRE, data engineering, and critical production systems.

You’ll be a player-coach, setting standards, shaping an AI-native engineering culture, and partnering with global teams in Mountain View, Shanghai, and Chengdu to drive reliability, security, and rapid iteration.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or equivalent required.
• 8+ years building software and systems.
• 3+ years managing engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Burnaby office as the on-site engineering authority.
• Build a high-performance culture with clear expectations and growth paths.
• Foster an AI-native engineering culture across teams and workflows.
• Own delivery across the site's domains including growth engineering and data-sensitive systems.
• Maintain alignment with security, reliability, and production readiness; influence across dotted lines.
• Partner globally with Mountain View, Shanghai, and Chengdu to represent Burnaby’s engineering voice.

Skills

Engineering leadership

People management

Strategic thinking

AI-native culture

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent

Job description

OpusClip is the world's No.1 AI video agent, built for authenticity on social media.

We envision a world where everyone can authentically share their story through video, with no expertise needed. Within just 18 months of our launch, over 10 million creators and businesses have used OpusClip to enhance their social presence.

We have raised $50 million in total funding and are fortunate to have some of the most supportive investors, including SoftBank Vision Fund, DCM Ventures, Millennium New Horizons, Fellows Fund, AI Grant, Jason Lemkin (SaaStr), Samsung Next, GTMfund, Alumni Ventures, and many more.

Check out our latest coverage by Business Insider featuring our product and funding milestones, and our recognition as one of The Information's 50 Most Promising Startups in 2024.

Headquartered in Mountain View, we are a team of 100 passionate and experienced AI enthusiasts and video experts, driven by our core values:

• Be a Champion Team

• Prioritize Ruthlessly

• Ship fast, Quality Follows

• Obsess over customers

Be a part of this exciting journey with us!

About the role

We're hiring an Engineering Lead to be the senior-most engineering leader in our Burnaby office — the person the whole site looks to for direction, standards, and momentum.

This is not a coordination role. You will own the output of a ~10-person engineering team spanning growth engineering, B2B/enterprise delivery, DevOps/SRE, data engineering, and our most production-and data-sensitive systems (authentication, billing-adjacent surfaces, PII). You'll set the bar for what great looks like, hold the team to it in person every day, and grow the org — its size, its talent density, and its next generation of technical leaders.

You'll work as a true player-coach: close enough to the architecture and the code to earn the respect of senior engineers, and experienced enough as a manager to build a team where high performance is the norm.

What you'll do

• Lead the office, in person. Be the visible, accountable engineering authority on‑site in Burnaby. Set the operating cadence, uphold standards and in‑office discipline, and create the environment where the team performs at its best whether or not anyone is watching.

• Build a high-performance culture, in both directions. This is the job, not a soft skill attached to it. Find the people already operating above their level: give them the visible work, pay and promote them accordingly, and make them the standard everyone else is measured against. Find the people who aren't clearing the bar: tell them plainly and early, then either grow them or move them on — quickly, and with dignity. Most leaders do the second half and call it talent density; we care at least as much about the first.

• Build an AI-native engineering culture. Champion a way of working where AI agents are part of every engineer's daily workflow — and where the leverage shows up in the team's output.

• Own delivery across the site's domains — and stay in the work. Growth and pricing are yours outright: experimentation, conversion, monetization, and the systems that decide what we charge and why. Data science and the reframing systems too. You'll review the designs, challenge the architecture, and unblock the hard problems yourself — senior engineers should want your opinion, not just your sign‑off. When one of those numbers moves, you should be the first person with a theory, not the last to hear.

• Hold the dotted lines without holding the org chart. Platform/SRE, security, and B2B engineering sit in this office but report elsewhere. That includes some of our most sensitive surfaces: sign‑on, PII, production access, infrastructure security. You won't own those reviews, and you will still be the reason those engineers are supported, visible, held to the same bar. If influence without authority reads as a demotion, this is the wrong role.

• Partner globally. Work daily with leadership and engineering teams in Mountain View, Shanghai, and Chengdu, and with product and CX teammates in the Burnaby office. Represent Vancouver's engineering voice in company‑level decisions.

This role probably isn't right for you if…

• You'd rather stay purely hands‑on-code than own the direction, quality, and growth of an engineering org

• Recruiting, mentoring, and performance management feel like chores rather than core to the job

• You think "AI-native" is a recruiting buzzword. Here it's the operating model. If the way you'd lead engineers here is the way you led them in 2023, you will be out‑shipped by teams half your size.

• You're uncomfortable giving direct feedback or making hard people decisions

• You prefer influencing from a distance over leading in person, on‑site, every day

• You're uncomfortable with rapid iteration speed and intensity of a top tier AI startup, ambiguity, or owning reliability and security outcomes end‑to‑end

Who we're looking for

• You're a few years into managing engineers, and you have something to prove. We're not looking for someone who's held the title for a decade and wants a quieter version of it.

• You've turned one specific team around, and you can tell us what it looked like before, what you actually changed, and how you knew it worked.

• You've done both halves of talent density in the same year: coached someone out, and made someone else the person everyone started copying.

• You can still lose an architecture debate to your best engineer on the merits, and win the rematch. There's a hands‑on exercise in this loop — for a leadership role, deliberately.

• You've owned a number a founder checks every week — conversion, pricing, revenue, reliability, cost — and you can say what you did the week it went the wrong way.

• You've been accountable for people who didn't report to you, and it worked anyway.

• Startup experience matters more to us here than brand names — AI or video, ideally. If your whole career has been inside large, stable organizations, this will be a bigger adjustment than it looks from the outside.

• Burnaby, on‑site, five days a week — and you read that as a feature of this job, not the price of it.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience; 8+ years building software, including 3+ years managing engineers.

Bonus if you have

• Growth engineering background — owning experimentation, conversion, or monetization surfaces

• Enterprise/B2B engineering experience — customer‑facing delivery, integrations, security reviews

• Experience with security and compliance for PII‑heavy systems (SOC 2, access control, data governance)

• Background in creator tools, video, or the creator economy

• Experience building an org or site from a similar size to 2–3x

Our benefits

• Comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage to support you and your well‑being

• Flexible paid time off that empowers you to recharge, reset, and come back stronger

• Generous equipment, software, and office furniture budget, including MacBook, 4K monitor, standing desks, and more of what you need to be creative and productive

• Access to the latest technologies and tools

• Free lunch, plus a wide variety of global snacks and beverages onsite

• Free parking

• Visa sponsorship available, subject to eligibility

EEO

OpusClip is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. OpusClip considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Opus Clip is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures.