Senior Software Engineer (Hybrid / Montreal)

Motion; Montreal; Hybrid; CAD 215,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity for all employees

Health benefits from day one

Monthly health & lifestyle stipend

20 days PTO

Work-from-home stipend

Job summary

Motion is building an AI-native platform for creative strategists. We are a 75-person remote team with a Montreal hybrid role, focusing on the VM layer and services behind Runneth.

You will own core infrastructure, work across Platform, Agent Runtime, and Runneth, and contribute to fast, scalable systems in a hands-on environment. The ideal candidate has strong TypeScript/Node.js/Rust skills, product shipping experience, and a proven ability to design reliable architectures.

Qualifications

• Product shipping experience in a small team
• Strong programming fundamentals across multiple languages
• Designed and shipped real systems
• Excellent communication skills and ability to explain architecture
• Ability to translate technical issues into business impact

Responsibilities

• Own features end to end: understand the problem, design, implement and deploy
• Build services and primitives that the Runneth user experience relies on
• Keep systems fast, reliable, and secure; handle data at scale
• Work on a small, high-ownership team that ships constantly
• AI coding as the default while upholding coding standards

Skills

TypeScript

Node.js

Rust

Systems design

Agile development

Tools

React

Express

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Azure

Job description

About Motion

Motion is building the command center for creative strategists: an AI-native platform that bridges the gap between performance marketers and creative teams, so they can uncover what’s working, what’s not, and ship more winning ads across platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta, and TikTok.

We're at the forefront of AI as the foundation of our product. Motion now automatically analyzes and organizes creative at scale and surfaces competitor trends. And with Runneth - the AI brain for the 100x marketer - we're going further: a persistent creative strategy agent that lives where your team already works (Slack, Notion, Google Drive, your ad data) and turns a marketer's knowledge and instincts into cross-channel playbooks, automated workflows, and a system that gets smarter over time. Our bet isn't that AI replaces great marketers. It's that the best marketers will use AI to operate at a scale that wasn't previously possible.

Today, Motion is trusted by some of the world’s top e-commerce and direct-to-consumer brands and agencies (including Vuori, True Classic, The Farmer’s Dog, and HexClad) and has analyzed over $14B in media spend. When leading brands want to understand their creative performance, they turn to us.

Our founders have built successful companies before, including alongside several of the people now at Motion. A number of teammates chose to build again here — a reflection of the trust, culture, and conviction behind what we’re building.

The people building Motion are deeply embedded in where AI and our industry is heading, and obsessed with closing the gap between what's possible and what's actually shipping in product. We're a 75 person remote team backed by $65M+ in funding with a valuation that's nearly 3x'd in under two years. If you want to work on a hard problem, with people who’ve done it before, and a product that customers genuinely love - we’d love to connect!

Brief overview of the Motion product & Runneth from our Co-Founder & CEO, Reza Khadjavi.

About the role

This is a hybrid role in our Montreal office, three or four days a week. As a Software Engineer, you'll work on the core infrastructure behind Runneth: the VM it runs on and the services that run inside it.

Engineering at Motion is roughly three teams: Platform (cloud infra, DBs, centralised services and APIs), Agent Runtime (the VM layer Runneth runs on, the applications inside it, our harness, and the primitives that the Runneth experience is built on), and Runneth itself (everything customer-facing). In Montreal you'll be sitting with a small tight-knit team of the engineers working on the Agent Runtime working AI-powered features that are core to the Runneth experience.

| Our tech stack: React, Node.js with Express, TypeScript, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Azure.

• Explore our Engineering at Motion page to learn more about our team, our work, and how we build together.
• Browse our Engineering Blog for an inside look at the decisions our team is making, the things we're learning, and what it means for us to be building an AI product today.

What you'd be doing

• Owning features end to end: understand the problem, make the calls, build it
• Working with the team to provide services and primitives that the Runneth user experience gets built on
• Keeping our systems fast, reliable and secure: integrations, data at scale, performance, and the devex problems in-between.
• Working on a small, high-ownership team that ships constantly.
• AI coding as the default, while holding what the LLMs produce to the same standard as code you wrote by hand.

Our ideal fit brings

• Lives in Montreal and wants to be in the office (close to Metro Mont-Royal) three or four days a week.
• Product shipping experience, ideally in a small team where you owned the outcome
• Interested in turning over stones, curious about stuff you’ve never done before.
• Strong programming fundamentals and production experience in multiple languages. Agent Runtime runs on TypeScript, Node.js, and Rust. You’ve designed and shipped real systems and care about their architecture. AI writes a lot of our code, so the job is engineering judgment, not output.
• Exceptional communication skills, you can explain the architecture of something you shipped; why you built it instead of buying it, what you'd change, and what happened when it reached users.
• You are able to translate technical issues into clear business impacts, and prioritise accordingly.
• Any background: self-taught, bootcamp, degree, founder. We love talent from everywhere!
• Bonus: you're comfortable with Linux and deep infra.

...and you'll be a strong fit if align with these qualities:

• A strong sense of ownership
• A pragmatic mindset
• Able to prioritise for real customer value rather than polishing every edge
• Comfort thriving in a fast-moving startup where requirements are ambiguous, shift quickly, and clarity isn't handed to you, you create it.
• You enjoy being a strong individual contributor and a supportive teammate. Engineering is a team sport here!

You're probably not the right fit if

• You do your best work with structure: a defined spec, a predictable calendar, 2 week sprint cycles
• You struggle to context switch: You can only handle one focus at a time, switching between live issues and your work is frustrating, you tend to ignore Slack.
• You want a steady, predictable pace: a roadmap that's set in advance and mostly stays fixed.
• You'd rather work remotely, or only come into the office now and then.
• You're looking for a leadership role or a specific title
• You're cautious or sceptical about AI, in general or as part of engineering. We're betting hard on agentic coding being the future; if that feels like a mandate rather than an unlock, it won't be a fit.

What you'll love about Motion

• Competitive compensation package: We offer competitive compensation, including equity for all employees, health benefits from day one, a monthly health & lifestyle stipend to support your well-being, 20 days of PTO, and a $1,500 work-from-home stipend.
• Growth that speaks for itself: Motion has strong product-market fit, 2.5x YoY growth, second-time founders with deep industry knowledge, and $65M in funding to fuel our momentum.
• Opportunity for impact: As an early team member, your contributions will directly shape the product, team, and the future of the company. If you're excited about building, you’ll thrive here!
• Award-winning team: We're a low-ego, high-performing team that was just ranked #19 on G2's list of Best Canadian Software Companies for 2026.

We closed out 2024 with a $30M Series B raise and strong signals from our customers. In 2025, we built the foundational capabilities our customers rely on, setting the stage for what's to come. In 2026, with fresh funding ($65M+ total capital raised), we’re building forward from that foundation, taking what we learned to market in a deeply AI-native way.

We use artificial intelligence (AI) in certain parts of our recruiting process at Motion, ranging from administrative and efficiency-focused support to, in some cases, conducting introductory interviews. Every AI interview is reviewed, and every hiring decision is made, by a (human) member of our team.

Compensation

The base pay range for this role is CA$215,000 – CA$300,000 per year.