Senior Software Engineer, AI (Agents)

Job Description Toast is recruiting on behalf of a Vancouver-based AI software company operating in the competitive intelligence space. The company is mid-sized and growing quickly, with hubs across Canada and the UK, and has made multiple strategic acquisitions in recent years to expand its platform capabilities. They are building AI-first products that help revenue teams win more deals by automatically surfacing market, competitor, and buyer insights at scale. This is a Senior Software Engineer role on the core engineering team, focused on building and optimizing the LLM-powered agents that sit at the heart of the product. Responsibilities

• Build and maintain backend systems that power agentic workflows, including retrieval pipelines, orchestration layers, and multi-step agent architectures that process large volumes of competitive data into actionable customer intelligence.
• Improve LLM-powered workflows end to end, from prompt design and retrieval strategy through to caching and latency optimization, making agent responses faster, more accurate, and more reliable in production.
• Own evaluation of agentic systems at scale by developing and operating evaluation frameworks that measure relevance, quality, latency, and end-to-end task success across agent pipelines.
• Design and build human-in-the-loop systems in collaboration with product and design, including feedback mechanisms, review workflows, and correction loops that keep AI agents accurate and trusted over time.
• Connect technical decisions to customer outcomes, shipping iteratively, measuring impact, and course-correcting quickly based on real usage.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and data teams to align technical direction with product goals and establish patterns for production-grade agentic systems.
• Stay current on advances in LLMs, retrieval architectures, and agentic reasoning, and bring that perspective into day-to-day technical decision-making.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience building and operating backend systems in production, with meaningful depth in at least one of search and retrieval, data pipelines, distributed systems, or API-heavy service architectures.
• Experience building or evaluating agentic or LLM-powered systems, including retrieval-augmented generation, multi-step agent workflows, or similar architectures.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with clean, maintainable, well-tested Python code and experience with backend frameworks, APIs, and production infrastructure.
• Familiarity with search and retrieval systems including tools like PGVector, Pinecone, or Elasticsearch and an understanding of hybrid retrieval and relevance tuning.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, or Azure, with a track record of building systems that handle scale, large data volumes, and low-latency requirements.
• Hands-on use of AI coding tools like Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code as part of your development workflow.
• Ability to lead projects end to end, make sound architectural decisions, and provide technical direction to others on the team.

Benefits

• Total compensation ranges from CA$145,000 to CA$183,000 annually, with equity participation through an employee stock option plan.
• Extended health and dental coverage begins on day one.
• Open vacation policy with no set limit on time off.
• You will be building AI agents that directly change how companies compete and win deals, with your work touching revenue outcomes at real organizations every day.
• The team is small enough that your decisions shape the product, and the company is growing fast enough that your impact compounds quickly.
• Direct access to leadership and a culture that encourages engineers to bring ideas to the table and influence product direction.
• Application Review

Submit your application, including your resume and cover letter, through our online portal. Our team will carefully review your qualifications and experiences. We take pride in responding promptly, so if your application aligns with our current opportunities, you’ll hear back from us with next steps. Your journey with Toast begins here, and we’re excited to see what you bring to the table!

• Vetting Call

If your application is successful, we’ll schedule a vetting call with a member of the Toast team. This 30-45 minute informal conversation is designed for us to get to know you better and assess your skills. Be prepared to discuss your past projects, the challenges you’ve tackled, and the impact you’ve made. This is your chance to shine and show us why you’re a great fit for the roles we offer.

• Profile Creation

Once you’ve impressed us in the vetting call, we’ll create an unbiased profile that highlights your experience while minimizing common biases. Instead, we focus on your skills, industry experience, and the impact you’ve made. This way, your profile reflects your true potential and accomplishments.

• Client Submission

After crafting your unbiased profile, we submit it to our trusted clients. We work closely with these clients to ensure they understand the value you bring. Throughout their interview process, we remain by your side, providing support and guidance. Our goal is to help you navigate the hiring process smoothly and confidently, ensuring you have the best chance to secure a role that fits your skills and aspirations.