Head of AI Engineering

About the Company
A fast-growing AI-powered digital commerce platform transforming how brands sell online. The platform provides unified ecommerce management solutions that help brands optimize the digital shelf, increase retail media ROI, and drive incremental sales across global marketplaces. Trusted by thousands of leading brands, the platform supports marketing, supply chain, and sales operations across more than 50 countries. Backed by top-tier investors, this is an opportunity to join a high-growth company shaping the future of AI in commerce.

The Role
We are seeking an Engineering Leader with a Data Science / Machine Learning background to head the incubation of next-generation AI-driven SaaS solutions. As Head of AI Engineering, you will be both a hands-on contributor and a leader: shaping the technical architecture of the AI platform while building and mentoring a founding team of engineers. Reporting directly to the cofounders, you will design and deliver advanced AI and agentic applications that drive measurable business impact for some of the world’s largest brands.

This role is ideal for a technical leader who has trained and shipped models into production, built agentic applications, and has a deep understanding of large-scale ML systems. Candidates must be located in the Toronto area.

What You'll Do

• Partner with cofounders to set and execute the AI engineering strategy.

• Hire, lead, and mentor a founding AI engineering team, building both technical depth and organizational capability.

• Act as a player-coach: contribute hands-on to architecture, model training, and backend engineering while scaling a team.

• Design and build scalable ML infrastructure for training, fine-tuning, deployment, and monitoring at production scale.

• Lead the development of agentic applications, including designing, training, and launching agents in real-world environments.

• Establish best practices for data quality, labeling, and ML pipelines to enable rapid experimentation and continuous improvement.

• Drive responsible AI development by ensuring reliability, ethics, safety, and performance of all models and agents.

• Collaborate closely with product, data science, and business teams to translate research breakthroughs into customer-facing features.

• Set engineering standards and build a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and accountability.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading AI/ML teams.

• Hands-on experience training AI/ML models, including foundation models, fine-tuned models, or specialized domain models.

• Proven experience building and deploying agentic applications, with deep knowledge of agent design patterns and orchestration.

• Track record of launching AI models and agents into production at scale.

• Advanced expertise in machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning.

• Experience designing scalable data systems and ML pipelines for training and inference.

• Proficiency in backend and ML-oriented programming languages such as Python, Java, Scala, or C++.

• Familiarity with ML frameworks and toolkits such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, LangChain, Ray, etc.

• Strong leadership, mentoring, and organizational-building skills.

• Excellent communication and influencing skills, including experience working with senior executives or founders.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field.