Overview

Saatchi & Saatchi is seeking a Lead Developer for an innovative AI platform initiative.
You have 8+ years building production software systems and at least a few years leading or anchoring a team technically. You are a hands-on builder and you hold the architectural picture of a multi-tier platform - React frontend, Spring Boot backend, FastAPI agentic services, agent SDKs on top of LLM providers. You are equally comfortable reviewing a database migration, debugging a prod incident, mentoring a senior engineer, or sitting in a client architecture conversation. You thrive at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and program reality.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction across the platform's tiers - frontend, backend, agentic/AI services, data, and integrations - and hold the shared mental model of how the system actually fits together.
• Pair closely with the Senior Technical PM and Program Director to translate product intent into a credible technical plan, and to surface what is genuinely hard vs. what is just unfamiliar.
• Lead architecture and design reviews, write the deciding ADR when needed, and keep a small set of vendor-neutral patterns the team can lean on instead of a sprawl of frameworks.
• Stay hands-on in the code - pick up meaningful slices of work, especially across tier boundaries (e.g. backend 60 agentic, frontend 60 auth/RBAC, infra-aware app changes).
• Be a first-class code reviewer across the stack: you set the bar for clarity, testability, security, and operability, and you raise the team's bar by reviewing thoughtfully.
• Mentor mid-level and senior engineers; coach them through technical decisions, on-call experiences, and difficult code reviews.
• Partner with the Platform Engineer on production reliability - capacity, scaling, observability, and incident response - and own application-side reliability concerns.
• Drive integration architecture with internal and external systems using API-first and event-driven patterns; ensure identity, authorization, data protection, and auditability are built in, not bolted on.
• Champion the LLM/agent layer - agent orchestration, tool/plugin design, prompt and evaluation loops, provider abstraction (e.g. Vertex AI, Claude on Vertex, OpenAI) - and keep us out of vendor lock-in we cannot pay for.
• Build redundancy on yourself - pair, document, rotate ownership, and ensure no critical system has exactly one person who understands it.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering, with meaningful time as a hands-on lead, staff engineer, or solutions architect on production systems.
• Proven experience designing and delivering complex, multi-service platforms - not just one service or one tier.
• Strong backend depth in at least one modern stack (Java/Spring Boot, Python/FastAPI, Node, Go, .NET); able to ramp on the others.
• Solid frontend literacy - comfortable reading and reviewing modern React/TypeScript code and reasoning about state management, auth, and performance.
• Strong cloud architecture background, preferably GCP (we run primarily on GKE); willing to deepen wherever the platform takes us.
• Deep understanding of API design, integration patterns, distributed systems, and the failure modes that come with them.
• Experience with containerization, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD; you do not need to be a DevOps specialist, but you must operate well in that world.
• Real production experience with AI / LLM systems - agents, RAG, evaluation, tool integration - or a strong, demonstrable plan for getting there.
• Comfortable working within Agile delivery models (Scrum, Kanban, or whatever variant actually ships).
• Excellent communication: you can explain a complex architecture to a non-technical executive and disagree with a senior engineer respectfully and with evidence.

Required Soft Skills

• Hands-on bias - you reach for the code, the logs, and the diagram before you reach for the meeting invite.
• Calm, decisive judgment when there is no obviously right answer.
• Strong written communication - you can write a one-page architecture rationale that future-you will still understand.
• Generous mentorship instinct - you make the people around you better, on purpose.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and willing to make reversible decisions quickly while flagging the irreversible ones for broader input.
• Pragmatic about technology choices - you optimize for the team's ability to operate the system, not for personal stack preferences.
• Honest about what you do and do not know; willing to say 'I'll find out' and then actually find out.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience working inside Publicis Groupe or another large holding-company agency network.
• Production experience with Google ADK, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, or comparable agent frameworks.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, domain-driven design, and contract-first integration patterns.
• Background in regulated or privacy-sensitive environments (identity, healthcare, financial, marketing-compliance).
• Experience supporting multiple products or clients on a shared platform (multi-tenant, multi-brand, white-label).
• Comfort with Terraform, Kustomize, or other IaC tooling at a 'can read and improve' level.
• Track record contributing to internal developer experience - patterns, scaffolds, golden paths.

Additional information

Location & Eligibility: Candidates must be based in Canada, with valid Canadian work authorization of at least 12 months.

Hybrid Work: This role is remote. If you are GTA-based, the team meets once a month at our Toronto office (111 Queen St. E, Suite 200, Toronto, ON M5C 1S2).

Time Off:

- Up to 3 weeks vacation, with additional paid closure between Christmas and New Year's

- Extended long weekends for provincial holidays - we give you both the Monday and Friday so you get a full 4-day break

- 10 personal days per year

Flexibility & Global Mobility: After completing one year, work remotely for up to 6 weeks per year from any of our 50+ global offices through our Work Your World program.

Benefits: Comprehensive group coverage including:

- Medical, dental, and vision care

- Psychological and paramedical services

- Disability insurance

- Fertility support and gender-affirming care

- Dedicated internal guidance programs for employees navigating cancer, fertility treatments, or gender transition

Parental Leave Top up: A 100% salary top up program once approved for Employment Insurance for the first 6 weeks of your parental Leave.

Defined Contribution Pension Plan: Employees have the option to sign up to voluntarily contribute to a DCPP where Saatchi will match the employee contributions up to 5% after completing one year.

Gym Membership: Corporate Membership rates at Good Life Fitness

Free access to a financial planner & more...

Compensation: The salary range for this position is $120,000-$140,000 per year, based on experience, skills, and relevant certifications. We believe in pay transparency and are committed to offering competitive, market-aligned compensation.