Founding AI Engineering Leader

Talent.com; Canada; Remote; CAD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Talent.com is seeking a Founding Head of Engineering to own the AI-native product's technical direction, architecture, and roadmap from day one. This is a hands-on, small-team leadership role in a remote Canadian environment.

You will hire, mentor, and lead engineers, set coding standards, and translate customer feedback into technical priorities that scale with the product and business goals. You’ll collaborate closely with product and leadership, ensure security and compliance, and nurture an

Qualifications

• Led engineering teams at real scale and chosen to go hands-on now.
• Founding or first-few engineer at a venture-backed AI startup.
• Shipped agentic LLM systems to paying enterprise customers, not demos.
• Decided between rewrite vs keep on in-flight codebase.
• Hired and mentored engineers, articulated strong early-stage bar.
• Set engineering culture to measurably improve team performance.
• Cleared a regulated procurement gate in production (security/bias/compliance).
• Full-stack capable across backend, frontend, and infra.
• Excellent communicator between technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Take full ownership of the product's codebase, architecture, and roadmap.
• Lead engineering for our AI-native product — end-to-end direction.
• Build AI capabilities deeply into the product, including LLM-based generation and workflows.
• Ship features from idea to users with clear, lean prioritization.
• Make foundational technical decisions — model selection, data/inference pipelines, observability.
• Build eval and observability layer for defensible agentic decisions.
• Sit in customer calls weekly; translate feedback into product.
• Recruit, interview, and hire the engineering team as we scale.
• Set and protect engineering culture as a deliverable; manage velocity and trust.
• Mentor future hires; set standards for code quality and shipping cadence.
• Partner with product/leadership on strategy and customer feedback loops.

Skills

Team leadership

Founding engineer

Agentic LLM systems

Hiring & mentoring

Engineering culture

Full-stack capable

Security & compliance

Technical communication

Python

Temporal

OpenAI/Anthropic

Tools

Temporal

Python

OpenAI/Anthropic integration

Job description

Talent.com is seeking a Founding Head of Engineering to own the AI-native product's technical direction, architecture, and roadmap from day one. This is a hands-on, small-team leadership role in a remote Canadian environment.

You will hire, mentor, and lead engineers, set coding standards, and translate customer feedback into technical priorities that scale with the product and business goals. You’ll collaborate closely with product and leadership, ensure security and compliance, and nurture an