Founding AI Engineer (Forward Deployed)

Position Description

We are looking for a Founding AI Engineering professional to help build this capability. This is a senior, hands-on role where you will build real AI products and help shape how they are built. You will work closely with client teams and lead by example through coding, architecture, and mentoring developers and co-ops.

This is a great fit for a builder with strong full-stack roots who has shipped AI products to production and wants to help shape a new AI engineering capability.

This role is hybrid and requires you to be at our downtown Toronto office and/or client office a minimum of 2-3 days per week, subject to change at any time.

Your future duties and responsibilities

• Design and build production AI systems, including full-stack applications, agents, and the services behind them.
• Set patterns and standards for building with AI, including prompt, context, harness, and loop engineering.
• Build shared tools, harnesses, and evaluations the team uses to move fast and stay reliable.
• Lead delivery while embedded with client teams, from first idea to a product in production.
• Mentor developers and co-ops through code reviews, pairing, and clear guidance.
• Own the quality, security, and reliability of what the team ships.
• Work with leadership to shape the roadmap and identify the right problems to solve.
• Keep learning and bring new AI tools and ideas into the team.
  
  

Required Qualifications To Be Successful In This Role

• 5–12 years building and shipping software, with recent hands-on AI work.
• Strong with Java and Node.js; able to design front end, back-end APIs, and data together.
• Strong with PostgreSQL and MongoDB, including design and performance.
• Experience shipping LLM or agent products to production and keeping them running.
• Experience building full-stack software daily with AI coding tools such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Antigravity, or Claude Code.
• Deep knowledge of prompt engineering, context engineering, harness engineering, and loop engineering.
• Ability to design evaluations and make AI systems safe, tested, and dependable.
• Experience deploying applications to the cloud, such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• Ability to lead a delivery team, mentor others, and set technical direction.
• Clear written and spoken English; able to explain technical work to developers and business leaders.
  
  

Assets / Nice to Haves

• Background in Banking, Insurance, or Wealth Management.
• Experience with RAG, vector databases, agent frameworks, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Experience with MLOps, observability, and monitoring for AI systems.
• Awareness of security, privacy, and compliance in regulated industries.
• Experience standing up a new team, practice, or product from scratch.
• Speaking, writing, or open source work that shows thought leadership in AI.
  
  

CGI is providing a reasonable estimate of the pay range for this role. The determination of this range includes factors such as skill set level, geographic market, experience and training, and licenses and certifications. Compensation decisions depend on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is $95,000–$145,000. This role is an existing vacancy.

Together, as owners, let’s turn meaningful insights into action.

Life at CGI is rooted in ownership, teamwork, respect and belonging. Here, you’ll reach your full potential because…

You are invited to be an owner from day 1 as we work together to bring our Dream to life. That’s why we call ourselves CGI Partners rather than employees. We benefit from our collective success and actively shape our company’s strategy and direction.

Your work creates value. You’ll develop innovative solutions and build relationships with teammates and clients while accessing global capabilities to scale your ideas, embrace new opportunities, and benefit from expansive industry and technology expertise.

You’ll shape your career by joining a company built to grow and last. You’ll be supported by leaders who care about your health and well-being and provide you with opportunities to deepen your skills and broaden your horizons.

At CGI, we value the strength that diversity brings and are committed to fostering a workplace where everyone belongs. We collaborate with our clients to build more inclusive communities and empower all CGI partners to thrive. As an equal-opportunity employer, being able to perform your best during the recruitment process is important to us. If you require an accommodation, please inform your recruiter.

That same commitment to fairness extends to how we use technology. To support our recruitment team, AI tools may be used to help assess applications though they never replace human judgement. All hiring decisions remain entirely in the hands of our recruitment professionals.

To learn more about accessibility at CGI, contact us via email. Please note that this email is strictly for accessibility requests and cannot be used for application status inquiries.

Come join our team - one of the largest IT and business consulting services firms in the world.