Hybrid Technical Lead – AI Focus

at Optix

• Job title: Technical Lead – AI Focus
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Cloud, ETL, Google Cloud Platform, Laravel, MySQL, PHP
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Vancouver, Canada

About the role

• Technical Lead guiding AI integration in a SaaS company, mentoring engineers and shaping product development practices with AI.

Responsibilities

• Partner with our Head of Product to translate business objectives into technical AI solutions and architectural decisions
• Establish evaluation frameworks and quality standards for AI feature development
• Mentor our engineering team, building their AI capability and driving adoption of AI-first development practices
• Guide technical decisions on model selection, integration patterns, and system architecture
• Design and build AI-powered features including intelligent sales widgets, automated message generation, and predictive workflow optimization
• Architect scalable AI systems that integrate seamlessly with our existing automations platform
• Implement monitoring and evaluation infrastructure to continuously improve AI feature performance
• Identify opportunities to leverage AI across our platform for maximum customer impact

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years building production AI features that customers actually paid for (not just prototypes)
• Proven experience at a SaaS company, navigating ambiguity and establishing AI best practices
• Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals; experience with PHP/Laravel and MySQL is a significant plus
• Deep hands-on expertise with AI APIs, prompt engineering, RAG implementation, and evaluation frameworks
• Experience mentoring engineers and driving adoption of new technical practices across a team
• Demonstrated ability to make architectural decisions that balance innovation with pragmatism
• You can clearly articulate when *not* to use AI and how to evaluate whether AI features are actually working
• Production experience integrating LLMs into existing application architectures
• Knowledge of AI frameworks like LangChain, Pydantic, LlamaIndex for building reliable AI features
• Deep understanding of prompt engineering, context management, and structured output for business applications
• Experience with model evaluation, A/B testing, performance monitoring, and quality assurance for AI features
• Knowledge of when to use RAG vs fine-tuning vs prompt engineering
• Experience leading the cultural shift to AI-first development practices within an existing team
• Data engineering background: ETL pipelines, vector databases, embedding management
• Deployment expertise: Containerization, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), monitoring AI systems in production
• Prior experience in B2B SaaS platforms serving enterprise customers

Benefits

• Competitive salary compensation and commission structure
• Strong Employee Stock Option Plan offering
• Excellent health and dental coverage program provided by Sunlife
• Mission-driven workplace experience with a positive, collaborative and supportive team culture
• Personal and professional growth opportunities
• Healthy snacks and locally roasted coffee – slow pour is our jam
• Team lunches and socials
• Annual health and fitness credit
• Fun offsite activities that allow us to reconnect as a team
• A beautiful, waterfront Gastown office and a flexible 60/40 hybrid workplace plan