Founding Lead (AI)

Location: Canada; hybrid work model based in Toronto with in-office days for connection and collaboration

Company

hirify.global is a Canadian fintech company providing an intelligent financial operating system with corporate cards, expense management, bill payments, and financial accounts for businesses.

What you will do

• Lead, grow, and develop a small team of product engineers and data/ML engineers.
• Own the roadmap for hirify.global's AI experiences with the Head of Product and propose new product bets.
• Take AI products from exploratory proofs of concept through customer-facing experiences at scale.
• Make technical decisions across model and LLM selection, evaluation design, infrastructure, latency, and inference cost.
• Build shared platform capabilities for extraction, evaluation, observability, agent and prompt frameworks, and data pipelines.
• Enable other product teams to ship AI experiences and decide quickly when exploratory initiatives should be stopped.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including senior- or staff-level work in a strong engineering environment.
• 2+ years of experience managing engineers, including people with different specialties.
• Hands-on experience building and shipping AI or LLM-backed products used by real customers in production.
• Experience building zero-to-one products or founding a software business.
• Strong depth in production AI systems, including evaluation design, scalable infrastructure, latency, and inference cost management.
• Product judgment, roadmap ownership, cross-functional alignment, and willingness to make both technical and product decisions.

Nice to have

• Experience fine-tuning models.
• Data science or ML engineering background.

Culture & Benefits

• High-autonomy role at a fast-growing Canadian fintech company.
• Customer-first, ownership-oriented, collaborative, and feedback-driven culture.
• Competitive compensation, equity options, and benefits.
• Hybrid work with in-office collaboration days in Toronto.
• Catered team lunches three days per week and a dog-friendly office.
• High-trust, high-performance environment focused on learning and impact.