The Role:
We are looking for an Engineering Manager – AI Incubation to establish and lead a new team of AI Engineers in our Toronto office. This is a player/coach role for a hands-on technical leader who thrives at the intersection of engineering and applied AI innovation.
You will work directly with the company’s cofounder to build, mentor, and scale a small, high-impact team that will design and ship AI-driven features across our platform. In this incubation environment, you’ll set the technical direction, architect scalable backend systems, and stay deeply hands-on with model training, retrieval systems, and agentic application development.
This is a unique opportunity to help shape the next generation of AI-native commerce intelligence products—while building and leading one of CommerceIQ’s most strategic engineering teams from the ground up.
Why This Role Matters
- High impact: Lead an incubation team building AI-native capabilities that directly shape CommerceIQ’s future product roadmap.
- Founder collaboration: Report directly to a cofounder, influencing both technical and product strategy.
- Hands-on innovation: Stay close to the code and models—mentoring engineers while contributing to core AI and backend development.
AI-first environment: Drive rapid experimentation, model deployment, and applied AI engineering at scale.
This is a remote role based out of Toronto. Please note that we are only considering candidates located in the Toronto area for this role.
What You'll Do:
- Build and lead a founding AI engineering team in Toronto, recruiting and mentoring top-tier engineers.
- Act as a player-coach, contributing hands-on to system architecture, backend services, and AI model development.
- Design and implement scalable backend systems that power AI-driven products, including model serving, retrieval pipelines, and agent orchestration.
- Oversee the full lifecycle of AI development—from data processing, model training, and fine-tuning to deployment and monitoring in production.
- Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and executives to define the AI roadmap and ship customer-facing solutions.
- Ensure engineering excellence across design, code quality, testing, and observability.
- Partner with the global engineering organization (U.S. and India) to align on architecture, infrastructure, and best practices.
- Cultivate a culture of technical rigor, creativity, and velocity within the incubation team.
What You'll Bring:
- 5+ years of experience in backend software development, with ideally 2+ years in people leadership roles (managing or mentoring engineers).
- Proven experience building and leading AI-focused engineering teams and delivering production-grade ML/AI systems.
- Hands-on experience with training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI models, including LLMs or domain-specific models.
- Deep understanding of agentic architectures—experience designing and launching AI agents and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines in production.
- Strong backend engineering expertise in Python, Java, Scala, or Go, and fluency with modern cloud-native systems (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Experience scaling ML infrastructure (data pipelines, model serving, monitoring, MLOps).
- Strong problem-solving, architectural, and communication skills; able to operate both strategically and tactically.
- A collaborative, entrepreneurial mindset—comfortable with ambiguity, iteration, and high ownership.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field (advanced degree in ML/AI a plus).
Compensation and Benefits:
The typical base pay range for this role in Toronto, ON is CAD $180,000 – $240,000 per year, plus variable bonus, long-term incentives in the form of stock options and potential discretionary bonuses.
This base pay range may be inclusive of several career levels at CommerceIQ and will be narrowed based on a number of factors including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location.
Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package at CommerceIQ. You may also be eligible for long-term incentives, in the form of company stock options, as well as potential discretionary bonuses and various benefits.
Check out our LinkedIn page to learn more about what it’s like to work at CommerceIQ!
