We are looking for a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in the real world. You will build across customer-facing experiences, backend services, agent workflows, integrations, and evaluation systems. The job begins with a customer or product problem and ends when the solution is operating successfully in production—not when a model call works locally.

You may work on voice ordering, reservations, catering, restaurant operations, client configuration, analytics, or entirely new agent capabilities. You will collaborate directly with product, design, customer-facing teams, and restaurant operators; make fast product and technical tradeoffs; and own the quality of the resulting experience. Our stack includes Python and FastAPI services, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React and Next.js applications, real-time voice agents built with LiveKit, cloud infrastructure on AWS, and modern LLM, speech, and multimodal providers.

Exact stack match is less important than full-stack range, product judgment, and a record of shipping. What You'll Own Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from problem discovery and prototype through launch, measurement, and iteration

Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, data models, agent tools, and integrations as one coherent product

Design agent workflows that combine models, context, memory, business rules, deterministic services, and human escalation

Work directly with restaurant and internal users to understand failures, uncover unmet needs, and convert feedback into reusable product capabilities

Integrate with POS, reservation, messaging, telephony, and other external systems while handling imperfect data and real operational constraints

Build evaluations, instrumentation,



guardrails, and feedback loops so probabilistic behavior can be measured and improved

Improve latency, reliability, accuracy, usability, and cost across the full experience—not only within one layer of the stack

Use AI-native development workflows to prototype and deliver quickly while retaining ownership of architecture, tests, security, and correctness

Participate in product and technical planning, make tradeoffs explicit, and drive decisions when the path is ambiguous

Raise the quality of nearby systems through code review, documentation, design discussion, and pragmatic refactoring Requirements 3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain

Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production web or platform products

Depth in either Python/backend engineering or TypeScript/React frontend engineering, plus the ability and desire to work effectively across the full stack

Experience building with LLMs, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems beyond a toy prototype

Product judgment: you can simplify scope, identify the highest-leverage user problem, and distinguish an impressive demo from a valuable product

Experience designing APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and integrations with external systems A solid quality bar for testing, observability, security, reliability, and user experience

Comfort working directly with users and operating in a fast-changing startup environment

AI-native working habits paired with independent technical judgment Benefits Competitive Salary and Stock Option Plan

Medical, dental, vision, retirement, leave, and disability benefits as applicable

Family Leave

Short Term & Long Term Disability

Paid time off and company holidays

Learning and development support

📌 AI Software Engineer, Product (Toronto)
🏢 Palona AI
📍 Toronto