Founding Engineer (AI)

HRB; Toronto; On-site; CAD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

HRB is seeking a Founding Engineer to own major parts of the core product, shaping the technical direction from day one. You will work across the stack—engineering, research, infrastructure, and product—delivering high-impact features with immediate visibility.

As a founding member, you’ll push GenAI capabilities, build scalable AI-enabled workflows, and collaborate with Growth and Customers to turn feedback into product decisions at speed.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of full-stack software engineering experience.
• Track record shipping production systems in fast-paced startup environments (0→1 or 1→10).
• Strength in backend systems, ML/AI pipelines, full-stack web development, or real-time/voice infrastructure.
• Curiosity and willingness to dive into applied R&D — LLMs, voice generation, speech recognition, reasoning models.

Responsibilities

• Push the boundaries of applied GenAI: deploy foundation models for dynamic conversations, reasoning, and large-scale thematic analysis.
• Innovate in voice & speech AI: improve pipelines for voice generation, speech recognition, and real-time conversation orchestration.
• Build full-stack product experiences: dashboards, collaboration tools, and intuitive workflows that make research faster and easier.
• Lead the future of agent-led UX: help shape a backend powered by intelligent agents and experiment with generative UI.
• Scale infrastructure: design systems that support thousands of concurrent AI-mediated interviews, large datasets, and secure enterprise integrations.
• Establish engineering excellence: define best practices, mentor early hires, and foster a culture of speed, rigor, and craftsmanship.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: work closely with Growth and Customers to turn feedback into the right product decisions at the right time.

Skills

Full-stack development

ML/AI product exposure

Job description

Our client is an AI-powered market research platform that helps organizations run qualitative research at quantitative scale. Leveraging advanced voice AI and automated analysis, they enable businesses to have natural, real-time conversations with hundreds of customers at once — turning months of traditional research into hours of actionable insights.

They’re reinventing the way companies understand their customers, transforming a historically underserved but critical function that drives innovation, marketing, and product positioning for major brands.

Why Join Them?

Explosive growth:
They’re seeing rapid traction across mid-market and enterprise, including six-figure deals and fast-moving sales cycles.

Clear product-market fit:
Most of their wins come from solving real customer pain points, meaning they rarely need to compete on price.

A naturally viral product:
Insights are easily shared across large teams, creating an organic product-led growth loop.

Elite founding team:
Their founders come from Google Research, Meta, Amazon, and Samsara, bringing deep experience scaling enterprise and PLG SaaS companies.

Huge market opportunity:
Demand for modern customer understanding tools is accelerating — and they’re positioned to become the end-to-end platform of choice for fast, high-quality insight generation.

The Role: Founding Engineer

As a founding engineer, you’ll own major parts of the core product and influence the technical direction from day one. You’ll work across the stack — engineering, research, infrastructure, and product — with work that has immediate and visible impact.

What You’ll Do

Push the boundaries of applied GenAI: deploy foundation models for dynamic conversations, reasoning, and large-scale thematic analysis.

Innovate in voice & speech AI: improve pipelines for voice generation, speech recognition, and real-time conversation orchestration.

Build full-stack product experiences: dashboards, collaboration tools, and intuitive workflows that make research faster and easier.

Lead the future of agent-led UX: help shape a backend powered by intelligent agents and experiment with generative UI.

Scale infrastructure: design systems that support thousands of concurrent AI-mediated interviews, large datasets, and secure enterprise integrations.

Establish engineering excellence: define best practices, mentor early hires, and foster a culture of speed, rigor, and craftsmanship.

Collaborate cross-functionally: work closely with Growth and Customers to turn feedback into the right product decisions at the right time.

What They’re Looking For

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

A track record of shipping production systems in fast-paced startup environments (0→1 or 1→10).

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

Curiosity and willingness to dive deep into applied R&D — LLMs, voice generation, speech recognition, reasoning models.

A high-energy builder mindset with a strong bias for action and comfort with ambiguity.

Bonus: experience with enterprise SaaS, insights/research tools, or scaling compute-heavy/AI-heavy systems.