Principal Software Engineer / Team Lead - AI Innovation

Position: Principal Software Engineer / Team Lead - AI Innovation
Location: Toronto, ON - Hybrid (2-3 days onsite)
Salary: $260K-$290K
Posting Type: Open vacancy

Our client, a leading global financial technology organization, is making a significant investment in building out its AI Innovation capability in Toronto.

We're looking for a Senior Principal Software Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with strong engineering leadership and a passion for building innovative, production-grade AI solutions.

This isn't a traditional management role. We're looking for a hands-on technical leader (70-80% coding) who can lead an engineering squad, shape architecture, mentor engineers and help bring new AI-powered applications from concept into production.

What you'll be doing:

- Lead the technical design, architecture and delivery of greenfield AI-powered applications.
- Remain deeply hands-on with software development while providing technical leadership to an engineering squad.
- Design scalable backend services, APIs, microservices and distributed systems.
- Partner with ML engineers and product teams to integrate AI/GenAI capabilities into enterprise applications.
- Drive engineering standards, code quality, technical decisions and mentorship.
- Influence the technical direction of new platforms and help establish best practices for AI-enabled software development.

What we're looking for:

- 15+ years of software engineering experience, including technical leadership at Staff, Principal, Senior Principal or Lead level.
- Strong hands-on development experience with Java/Spring Boot (preferred) or Python.
- Familiarity with React; you don't need to be a frontend specialist, but you've worked with some of the frameworks.
- Deep expertise in cloud technologies (AWS/Azure), microservices, distributed systems and software architecture.
- Real-world production AI/GenAI experience, such as integrating LLMs, RAG, AI agents or other intelligent capabilities into enterprise applications.
- Proven experience leading technical initiatives, mentoring engineers and making architectural decisions.
- Someone who enjoys solving complex technical problems and is still actively writing code.

Interested? Please send your updated resume to Zhanna Dalbenka at zhanna.dalbenka@quantum-qtr.com.

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