Principal Engineer/ AI-Native Platform

Motion Recruitment; Toronto; On-site; CAD 170,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Motion Recruitment is seeking a Principal Engineer to take significant ownership of architecture while helping scale a small, experienced engineering team. You will lead platform engineering through an AI-native transition, shaping workflows, tooling, and governance while remaining hands-on in Golang and distributed systems.

You will mentor engineers, influence architectural standards, and partner with product and executive leadership to position the organization for its next growth phase.

Qualifications

• Leading a platform engineering team through the transition to AI-driven development and establishing new workflows, tooling, and governance.
• Hands-on Golang engineering experience with distributed systems, Kubernetes, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Producing or integrating AI agents into commercial software, including workflows, observability, and production reliability.
• Experience building an AI-native software delivery lifecycle with specification-driven development and automated review and testing.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on engineering: lead critical architecture and implementation in a hands-on role (70%).
• Team collaboration and cross-functional work with product and leadership (30%).

Skills

Platform leadership

Golang

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Cloud-native

Job description

A growing technology company operating complex, security-sensitive systems is seeking a Principal Engineer to take significant ownership of architecture while helping scale and evolve a small, experienced engineering organization.

You’ll work across a distributed, cloud-native platform while helping establish an AI-native approach to software delivery—moving engineering toward specification-driven development, automated implementation, and rigorous technical review.

This is a highly hands-on technical leadership role for someone who can architect and build critical systems, introduce new engineering practices, mentor experienced developers, and establish the technical foundations needed for the organization’s next stage of growth. You’ll have substantial influence over both the platform and how the engineering team builds software.

Required Skills & Experience

• Direct experience personally leading a Platform engineering team through the transition from traditional software development to an AI-driven development model. You should have implemented new workflows, tooling, quality controls, and engineering practices around AI-assisted or agentic development—not simply used AI coding tools as an individual contributor.
• Strong hands-on Golang engineering experience combined with deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, Kubernetes, and cloud-native infrastructure. You should be comfortable remaining close to the code while making architectural decisions that influence the broader engineering organization.
• Production experience designing, building, or integrating AI agents into commercial software products, including practical knowledge of agent workflows, tool use, orchestration, model integration, guardrails, evaluation, observability, and the reliability challenges associated with moving agentic systems from prototype to production.

Desired Skills & Experience

• Advanced experience establishing an AI-native software delivery lifecycle, including specification-driven development, AI-generated code review, automated testing and evaluation, governance, and effective use of modern coding agents and agentic development platforms.
• Experience architecting highly available, security-sensitive platforms using technologies such as distributed databases, secrets-management systems, container orchestration, multi-region architectures, and modern authentication or authorization approaches.
• Experience acting as a senior technical leader within a small or scaling engineering organization, including mentoring engineers, raising architectural standards, hiring technical talent, influencing engineering culture, and partnering directly with product and executive leadership.

Daily Responsibilities

• Hands-On Engineering: 70%
• Team Collaboration & Cross-Functional Work: 30%

Posted By: Adrian Cronk