Ex-Technical Founder / Founding Engineer

Motion; Montreal; Remote; CAD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity for all employees

Health benefits from day one

Monthly health & lifestyle stipend

20 days PTO

Work-from-home stipend

Job summary

Motion is building an AI-native platform for creative strategists and is seeking a founding engineer to join as an IC. You’d own significant code and ship AI-powered features across the product, contributing from day one in a distributed, remote-first team with strong growth and impact.

You’ll join an 80-person team with funding and a clear path to scale, collaborating across Platform, Harness, and Runneth efforts.

Qualifications

• Founding engineer with startup background and ownership of meaningful codewritten
• Experience shipping product in small, high-ownership teams
• Ability to explain complex architecture and trade-offs

Responsibilities

• Shipping features across the product: understand the problem, make the call, build it, and own the outcome.
• Working on a small, high-ownership, cross-functional team.
• Shipping to production in your first week and owning a significant initiative in your first month.
• Working with the team to use more AI better and improving things across the stack from your experience
• Fixing whatever is in the way, you've done this before.

Skills

Technical founder experience

Ownership mentality

Shipping pace

Tools

React

Node.js

TypeScript

GraphQL

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Azure

Job description

About Motion

Motion is building the command center for creative strategists: an AI-native platform that bridges the gap between performance marketers and creative teams, so they can uncover what’s working, what’s not, and ship more winning ads across platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta, and TikTok.

We're at the forefront of AI as the foundation of our product. Motion now automatically analyzes and organizes creative at scale and surfaces competitor trends. And with Runneth - the AI brain for the 100x marketer - we're going further: a persistent creative strategy agent that lives where your team already works (Slack, Notion, Google Drive, your ad data) and turns a marketer's knowledge and instincts into cross-channel playbooks, automated workflows, and a system that gets smarter over time. Our bet isn't that AI replaces great marketers. It's that the best marketers will use AI to operate at a scale that wasn't previously possible.

Today, Motion is trusted by some of the world’s top e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands and agencies (including Vuori, True Classic, The Farmer’s Dog, and HexClad) and has analyzed over $14B in media spend. When leading brands want to understand their creative performance, they turn to us.

Our founders have built successful companies before, including alongside several of the people now at Motion. A number of teammates chose to build again here — a reflection of the trust, culture, and conviction behind what we’re building.

The people building Motion are deeply embedded in where AI and our industry is heading, and obsessed with closing the gap between what's possible and what's actually shipping in product. We're a 75 person remote team backed by $65M+ in funding with a valuation that’s nearly 3x’d in under two years. If you want to work on a hard problem, with people who've done it before, and a product that customers genuinely love - we'd love to connect!

Brief overview of the Motion product & Runneth from our Co-Founder & CEO, Reza Khadjavi.

About the role

You've built something from zero, as a founder or early engineer. You know what it takes to find pmf, build for users, and take ownership of everything. If building is the part you loved in that experience, this is that job with a team and a product that you don’t need to bootstrap from nothing.

Motion is already a place where people chose to build again. Our founders built companies before, we have a few ex-founders with us, and several team members have come back to Motion again.

Applying for this role includes a process of working out how you’d fit in on the team - all startups have more important work than people to do it. Engineering at Motion is roughly three teams: Platform (cloud infra, DBs, centralised services and APIs), Harness (our agentic harness Runneth, the VM it runs on, and the primitives that the Runneth experience is built on), and Runneth itself (everything customer-facing). Where you land depends on what we need most when you start and where you’re able to contribute the most impact. What we do know: you'll be building AI-powered features across the product, and you'll own what you ship.

One note on the title: founding engineer is the experience we're looking for, not the seat itself. Internally you'd join as a senior+ engineer. You bring the ownership mentality and shipping pace that founding teaches, we bring an 80-person team, runway, challenges, and a product customers already rely on.

| Our tech stack: React, Node.js with Express, TypeScript, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Azure.

• Explore our Engineering at Motion page to learn more about our team, our work, and how we build together.
• Browse our Engineering Blog for an inside look at the decisions our team is making, the things we're learning, and what it means for us to be building an AI product today.

What you'd be doing

• Shipping features across the product: understand the problem, make the call, build it, and own the outcome.
• Working on a small, high-ownership, cross-functional team.
• Shipping to production in your first week and owning a significant initiative in your first month.
• Working with the team to use more AI better and improving things across the stack from your experience
• Fixing whatever is in the way, you've done this before.

Our ideal fit brings

• You were the technical founder, co-founder, or one of the first engineers at a startup, and you personally wrote a meaningful share of the code, recently.
• Years of shipping product, ideally in a small team where you owned the outcome
• You can make complicated architecture sound simple. You can explain why you built what you built, what you’d change, tradeoffs you made, and how it fits together.
• Comfort building without a spec.
• Any background: self-taught, bootcamp, degree. We love talent from everywhere!

You’re probably not the right fit if:

• You're looking for a “leadership” role. This is an IC role where you get judged by your ability to product. Ideally you’ll show leadership, but through influence and competence, not title.
• You need process or clear requirements. It's chaotic here in the way early companies are: priorities move, context-switching is a constant, ambiguities abound, you have to do the executing.
• You're skeptical about AI. We're betting hard on not just agentic coding, but on Runneth is a bet on the idea of agentic employees. Yes there’s still work to do in adapting to the new reality, but we’re all in.

What you'll love about Motion

• Competitive compensation package: We offer competitive compensation, including equity for all employees, health benefits from day one, a monthly health & lifestyle stipend to support your well-being, 20 days of PTO, and a $1,500 work-from-home stipend.
• Remote-first with hybrid flexibility: We're a remote-first company with team members spanning Canada, the U.S., and beyond, but also have office spaces in 4 main hubs (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Porto) for optional hybrid work.
• Growth that speaks for itself: Motion has strong product-market fit, 2.5x YoY growth, second-time founders with deep industry knowledge, and $65M in funding to fuel our momentum.
• Opportunity for impact: As an early team member, your contributions will directly shape the product, team, and the future of the company. If you're excited about building, you’ll thrive here!
• Award-winning team: We're a low-ego, high-performing team that was just ranked #19 on G2's list of Best Canadian Software Companies for 2026.
• Team connection:
  • Virtual: Day-to-day, we use Roam, an AI-powered virtual office platform that fosters spontaneous collaboration, drop into meetings or quick chats, and interact with colleagues for a simulated, "live" digital headquarters.
  • In-person: Outside of the option to go to one of our offices, our team gets together in-person for a week every two months, and we have a company retreat every summer.

We closed out 2024 with a $30M Series B raise and strong signals from our customers. In 2025, we built the foundational capabilities our customers rely on, setting the stage for what's to come. In 2026, with fresh funding ($65M+ total capital raised), we’re building forward from that foundation, taking what we learned to market in a deeply AI-native way.

We use artificial intelligence (AI) in certain parts of our recruiting process at Motion, ranging from administrative and efficiency-focused support to, in some cases, conducting introductory interviews. Every AI interview is reviewed, and every hiring decision is made, by a (human) member of our team.