Founding Engineer (AI)

HRB; Toronto; On-site; CAD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

A pioneering technology firm in Toronto is looking for a founding engineer to shape the product stack and technical direction. Ideal candidates will have over 5 years of full stack software engineering experience, particularly with ML/AI products. Responsibilities include deploying advanced AI models and enhancing voice and speech technology. This role offers the opportunity to work in a fast-paced startup environment with a focus on innovation and growth.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of full stack software engineering experience.
• Experience in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Strength in backend systems or real-time infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Deploy foundation models for dynamic human conversations.
• Advance voice generation and speech recognition pipelines.
• Build features for faster and intuitive research tools.
• Design systems for AI-mediated interviews.
• Establish engineering best practices and mentor early hires.
• Integrate product feedback closely with Growth and Customers.

Skills

Full stack software engineering

Machine Learning

AI pipelines

Real-time infrastructure

Voice generation

Speech recognition

Job description

About Us

We are an AI-powered market research platform that enables companies to conduct qualitative research at quantitative scale. Using advanced voice AI and automated analysis, we help businesses have natural conversations with hundreds of customers simultaneously, transforming months of research into hours of insights..

We’re reinventing market research, insights, and customer understanding — a critical but underserved part of business — which directly impacts innovation, marketing, and positioning for iconic brands.

Why Us?

• Explosive growth:We’re seeing traction across mid-market and enterprise, including six-figure deals and high-velocity sales cycles.

• Product-market fit:We close at a high rate, and most deals are driven by real customer pain—meaning we rarely compete on price.

• A viral product:Insights are easy to share across entire organizations, creating a natural product-led growth loop.

• Elite team:Our founding team comes from Research at Google, Engineering at Meta and Amazon, and growth at Samsara — we have deep expertise scaling enterprise and product-led SaaS companies.

• Massive market:The customer understanding market is huge, with growing demand for tools that help run end-to-end workflows and deliver high quality customer insights with speed and scale.

What You’ll Do

As a founding engineer, you’ll own core parts of the product stack and help chart the technical direction of the company. Expect to work across fullstack engineering, research, infrastructure, and product, with impact that’s visible from day one.

• Push the boundaries of applied GenAI:Deploy foundation models for dynamic, 1-1 human conversations, reasoning, and thematic analysis at scale.

• Voice & Speech AI:Advance our pipeline for voice generation, speech recognition, and real-time conversation orchestration.

• Full-stack product development:Build features that make research faster and more intuitive for end-users — from insights dashboards to collaboration tools.

• Push the boundaries of agent-led UX:Our backend is agent-led, meaning that users access many of our features by talking to an agent. Build the future of agent-led UX and lead experiments with generative UI.

• Scale infrastructure:Design systems that reliably run thousands of AI-mediated interviews concurrently, manage growing datasets, and integrate securely into enterprise workflows.

• Shape the foundation:Establish engineering best practices, mentoring early hires, and contributing to a culture of speed, rigor, and craftsmanship.

• Close the loop:Work closely with Growth and Customers to bring product feedback into the roadmap, ensuring we’re building the right things at the right time.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of full stack software engineering experience, ideally with exposure to ML/AI products or infrastructure.

• Experience shipping production systems in afast-paced startup environment(0→1 or 1→10).

• Strength inone or more of:backend systems, ML/AI pipelines, full-stack web, real-time/voice infrastructure.

• Curiosity and ability to go deep in applied R&D areas likeLLMs, voice generation, speech recognition, and reasoning models.

• High energy builder mindset that biases for action. Excitement for ambiguity. There’s lots to build and lots we don’t know. Let’s learn and grow together!

• Bonus: prior experience with enterprise SaaS, research/insights tools, or scaling products with heavy data/compute requirements.