Saatchi & Saatchi is seeking a Lead Developer for an cutting-edge 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. 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. 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 agentic, frontend auth/RBAC, infra‑aware app changes).

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. ensure identity, authorization, data protection, and auditability are built in, not bolted on. Vertex AI, Claude on Vertex, OpenAI) — and keep us out of vendor lock‑in we cannot pay for. 8+ years in software engineering, with meaningful time as a hands‑on lead, staff engineer, or solutions architect on production systems.

Strong backend depth in at least one modern stack (Java/Spring Boot, Python/FastAPI, Node, Go, .NET); Solid frontend literacy — comfortable reading and reviewing modern React/TypeScript code and reasoning about state management, auth, and performance. 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. Pragmatic about technology choices — you optimize for the team's ability to operate the system, not for personal stack preferences.



Prior experience working inside Publicis Groupe or another large holding‑company agency network.

Experience with event‑driven architectures, domain‑driven design, and contract‑first integration patterns. This role is remote. If you are GTA‑based, the team meets once a month at our Toronto office (111 Queen St.

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. 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.

Medical, dental, and vision care. Disability insurance.

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

Corporate Membership rates at Good Life Fitness. We use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of our hiring process, such as reviewing applications or analyzing resumes. These tools assist our recruitment team but never replace human decision‑making.

Saatchi & Saatchi is committed to building a diverse workforce representative of our community. We encourage and are pleased to consider all qualified candidates, without regard to race, colour, citizenship, religion, sex, marital / family status, sexual orientation, gender identity, aboriginal status, age, disability or persons who may require an accommodation.

📌 Lead Full-Stack Software Engineer (Remote) (Toronto)
🏢 Publicis Groupe Holdings
📍 Toronto