Principal Engineer: AI-Native Platform Architect

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

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.