AVP, Lead Software AI Engineer

AVP - Senior Engineering Lead, AI Software Engineering

Location: Toronto, ON | Work arrangement: [Hybrid] | Employment type: Full-time, Permanent

About the Opportunity

Our client, a large and well-established enterprise organization, is looking for a Senior Engineering Lead to oversee the continued development of its internal generative AI platform. The platform is already in production and supports a large employee user base.

The successful candidate will be accountable for the platform’s technical direction and quality. The role is heavily hands-on: alongside providing technical leadership to a small development team, the incumbent will spend most of their time on development work.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Delivery

• Design, develop and maintain production services and user interfaces in Python and TypeScript.
• Improve the platform’s retrieval-augmented generation capabilities, including document segmentation, semantic and keyword search, result ranking and response streaming.
• Enhance document ingestion processes for a range of file formats, including scanned content requiring optical character recognition.
• Evaluate large language model and embedding services for accuracy, performance and cost, and recommend improvements based on the findings.
• Manage containerized deployments, automated build and release pipelines, and the promotion of releases through testing environments to production.
• Establish monitoring, alerting and service-level objectives, and lead incident resolution and post-incident reviews.
• Assess emerging AI techniques and bring suitable ones into production.

Leadership and Stakeholder Engagement

• Provide technical guidance to a small team of engineers through design reviews, code reviews and mentorship.
• Work with product owners and business partners to define AI solutions with measurable outcomes.
• Communicate technical direction, risks and tradeoffs to senior leadership in clear, non-technical terms.

Required Qualifications

• Approximately ten years of professional software development experience, including substantial experience delivering AI or machine learning solutions in production environments.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and TypeScript, with experience across both backend and frontend development.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing retrieval-based LLM applications.
• Experience integrating commercial LLM APIs into user-facing applications.
• Proven experience operating containerized applications on Kubernetes within automated deployment pipelines.
• Strong working knowledge of a major public cloud platform.
• A demonstrated record of delivering and supporting production systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting to senior stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with document processing or OCR solutions at scale.
• Familiarity with agent-based AI architectures and tool-calling workflows.
• Regular use of AI-assisted development tools.
• Experience in a regulated industry.
• Contributions to open-source projects.