Location: REMOTE / Montreal, Quebec
This job allows you to work remotely.
Talent.com is one of the largest job search and recruitment platforms in the world, with over 35 million job listings across 78 countries and tens of millions of unique monthly visitors. Our mission is to centralize all jobs available on the web — from company career sites, staffing agencies, and job boards — into a single, seamless experience for job seekers and employers.
This Role:
We're building a product where AI isn't a feature bolted on the side — it's woven through every layer, from how the product is generated to how users experience it. We're looking for a Founding Engineer to take technical ownership of what's been built so far and lead it through its next chapters: shipping, scaling, and growing the team behind it.
This is a high-leverage role with the autonomy and influence that come with being the founding engineer on a new product. You'll set the technical direction, make the architectural calls that matter, and become the person who hires and mentors the engineers who join after you.
You Will:
•Take full ownership of the product's codebase, architecture, and roadmap.
•Lead engineering for our AI-native product — own the technical direction end-to-end.
•Build and integrate AI capabilities deeply into the product, including LLM-based generation, agentic workflows, evals, and the infrastructure that supports them in production.
•Ship fast. Take features from rough idea to in front of users with strong instincts for what to build, what to cut, and what to defer.
•Make the foundational technical decisions — model selection, evaluation frameworks, data and inference pipelines, observability, and the trade-offs between latency, cost, and quality.
•Build the eval and observability layer that makes agentic decisions defensible to customer security, procurement, and legal teams.
•Sit in customer calls weekly. Translate customer signal directly into product.
•Recruit, interview, and hire the engineering team as we scale. You'll define the bar, run the loops, and shape the engineering culture from day one.
•Mentor and lead future hires, setting standards for code quality, review, and shipping cadence.
•Partner closely with product and leadership on strategy, prioritization, and customer feedback loops.
Must Have Skills:
•Founding or first-few engineer at a venture-backed AI startup. You've felt what it's like to operate without a playbook.
•Shipped agentic LLM systems to paying enterprise customers — not prototypes, not internal demos. Real users, real workflows, real escalation paths.
•Made the rewrite vs. keep call on someone else's in-flight codebase — and were right about it.
•Hired and mentored engineers. Even informally. You can articulate what makes a strong early-stage technical bar.
•Cleared a regulated procurement gate in production — security review, bias audit, compliance certification, or equivalent.
•Full-stack capable. You move comfortably across backend, frontend, and infra; you know when to specialize and when to glue things together.
•Comfortable in a conversation with a Head of Recruiting. You can translate between the customer and the codebase in the same hour.
•Excellent communicator who can translate between technical and non-technical audiences.
