Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

• Location: Fully Remote, Within Canada (Eastern Time Zone ± 1 hour)
• Role Type: Full-time, Permanent
• Reports to: Senior Vice President, Engineering

About The Role

Our client is a scaling start-up developing AI-enabled physical security solutions and is seeking a highly capable, hands-on generalist Staff or Principal Software Engineer to join their core technical team. In this role, you will be instrumental in developing and scaling AI-powered video surveillance detection pipeline, leveraging state-of-the-art computer vision models to achieve sub-one-second detection latency at scale.

This is an individual contributor role focused on execution, architecture, and problem-solving rather than management. You will thrive if you enjoy working full-stack across complex systems, navigating ambiguity, pivoting quickly, and building high-impact products with low organizational overhead.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and optimize backend services and processing pipelines using Python, Linux, and PostgreSQL.
• Integrate, test, and evaluate open-source AI/Vision-Language Models for real-time video surveillance and detection workflows.
• Solve performance bottlenecks to achieve sub-one-second latency at scale while maintaining low false-positive rates.
• Maintain hands-on involvement across the entire stack, leveraging AI-assisted workflows such as Claude Code to accelerate development.
• Participate in peer reviews, architecture discussions, and calibration of detection models.

Qualifications & Skills

• Seniority: Staff or Principal Software Engineer background with a strong track record of hands-on delivery.
• Core Tech Stack: Deep proficiency in Python, PostgreSQL, and Linux environments.
• AI/ML Experience: Hands-on experience or strong working knowledge in AI model evaluation, testing, and integration (experience with open-source vision/language models is a strong plus).
• Full-Stack/Generalist Mindset: Broad technical range with comfort moving across back-end architecture, data pipelines, and infrastructure integration.
• Adaptability: Thrives in fast-paced environments with rapid iteration, evolving scope, and minimal structure.
• Geographic Location: Remote within Canada. Ideally located within the Eastern Time Zone ± 1 hour

Key Mindset & Culture Fit

• Problem Solving: Superior technical problem-solving and architectural judgement.
• Collaboration: Humble, collaborative disposition with a keen appetite to work creatively both independently and in cooperation with an experienced leadership team. We value curiosity, innovation, high technical execution paired with respect and mutual trust.

Must be legally eligible to work in Canada. We sincerely thank all applicants for their interest, however only those candidates selected for interview may be contacted.

Originally posted on