Staff / Principal AI Developer
Montreal, Canada, Hybrid
About the Role:We are hiring a Staff or Principal level AI Developer who is passionate about electronics. You will play an early and foundational role leading the technical direction and implementation of product AI systems at Cadstrom.
You will define the core AI platform supporting a wide range of use cases - with your decisions grounded in evidence from rigorous experimentation. You will own the experimentation and evaluation framework that lets us improve faster than anyone else in the space, and will partner directly with the founders and product owners to translate AI capability into customer outcomes.
We move fast - the product is shipping, customers are live, and every week matters. This is a high-ownership role for a detail-obsessed AI developer who treats Cadstrom's outcome as their own. Your judgment will help shape the AI moat that distinguishes Cadstrom from every other tool in the EDA industry. You'll be measured not just on what you build, but on how much more effective the team and the product become because you're here.
Key Responsibilities:- Build and own the experimentation and evaluation tooling that electrical engineering domain experts use to analyze, calibrate, and improve our AI systems. Define what "good" looks like and what evidence is required to move forward.
- Design and ship self-improving systems exposed to our customers - closing the loop between production signal, evaluation, and pipeline improvements.
- Design and own the tool/action surfaces our AI agents reason over (MCP-based or otherwise) - the contracts, error handling, guardrails, and observability that make multi-step agents reliable in the wild.
- Dive deep into the data to diagnose and fix the root causes of performance issues based on model traces, outputs, replay, and experiments.
- Partner closely with electrical engineers to internalize domain conventions and translate that understanding into better prompts, schemas, and evaluations.
- Contribute broadly to AI across the product. Beyond your primary focus area, you'll also help advance our pipelines for data extraction from electrical component datasheets and other AI surfaces of the product.
- Raise the bar across the team. Mentor AI engineers, set strong code and review standards, and have a say in hiring as we continue to grow.
Required Qualifications:- 6+ years building AI/ML systems, with multiple production launches you led the technical direction for. You've owned outcomes, not just tickets.
- Deep practical experience with LLMs (prompt engineering, RAG, eval design), including the realities of getting stochastic systems to behave reliably in production.
- Track record of building from a small initial dataset to a robust, calibrated, continuously improving system. You know how to design ground truth, run principled experiments, and avoid deceiving yourself with the wrong metric.
- Architectural judgment: you can weigh tradeoffs across cost, latency, accuracy, maintainability, and time-to-impact, and share your reasoning with peers, juniors, and executives.
- Demonstrated multiplier effect on the teams you've been part of - through mentorship, tooling, standards, or how you bring domain experts into the loop.
- TypeScript proficiency, with strong instincts around type safety, packaging, services, and testing.
- Meticulous attention to detail in debugging and root-cause analysis.
- Excellent written and visual communication; you adapt to your audience, from engineers to executives.
- Undergrad in CS/Engineering/STEM; relevant graduate degree or equivalent experience is a plus.
Preferred Qualifications:- Shipped agentic systems in production - not just prototypes. You can speak with conviction about what makes them materially harder than linear pipelines.
- Experience building and optimizing tools (MCP-based or otherwise) for use by AI agents.
- Electronics fundamentals (e.g. interpreting a datasheet) via coursework or hobbyist experience.
- Retrieval (vector DBs), chunking/embedding strategies, and context budgeting.
- LLM-ops platforms (e.g. LangSmith, LangGraph, DSPy).
- Data pipelines in a cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure).
- Startup experience, or a research-based Master's in a STEM field.
- Based in Montreal or the GTA
Personal Qualities:- Detail-obsessed. You notice what others miss - in model outputs, in datasheets, in code - and you chase it down.
- Bias to action with high ownership. You don't wait for perfect information; you make calls with what you have and adjust, treating Cadstrom's outcome as your own.
- Disciplined experimenter. You hold hypotheses loosely and the scientific method tightly. Evidence changes your mind.
- Clear communicator. You write to be understood and reach for a plot or table when words won't do.
- Multiplier. You make the engineers and domain experts around you better.
- Embraces the ethos of "We, not I."
Why you'll love working with us:- Early Stage Equity Package - We want owners, not employees. You'll receive meaningful early-stage equity in a high-growth company, because we want you to share in what we build.
- Impact - You'll have the chance to make a significant impact not only for our customers, but on how the industry as a whole approaches test and validation.
- Care - we believe strongly in caring for each other. We encourage our people to bring their whole selves to work, support each other, and ensure they are happy in and out of the workplace.
- Leading benefits - we invest deeply in the health and wellbeing of our team with leading startup benefits, 0% co-pay across the board, and a $2k/year HSA.
- World-Class Backers - Cadstrom is backed by world-class investors: Bison Ventures (Bill Gates), Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt), and the Allen Institute for AI (Paul Allen).
