About Apply APPLY is the Agentic Customer Experience (ACx) partner for the world’s most ambitious consumer and entertainment brands. We bring together deep domain expertise across Retail, CPG, Sports, and Media with AI-native delivery capability, designing and delivering agentic solutions that turn CX vision into commercial reality. We are the partner of choice for brands like Arc'teryx, NFL, Lululemon, and Kraft Heinz. For more information, visit applydigital.com .

LOCATION LOCATION:

APPLY is hybrid/remote friendly. The preferred candidate should be based in Canada, working in hours that align to

PT or

ET .

THE ROLE As a Principal Agentic Engineer, you will operate at the intersection of deep full-stack engineering craft and AI-native delivery. This is an L5 principal-level role where you own the technical vision across the entire stack for complex, enterprise-scale systems, while simultaneously driving APPLY's agentic delivery model: architecting, orchestrating, and directing teams of coding agents to accomplish implementation at speed and scale.

You are comfortable moving fluidly across frontend, backend, APIs, data layers, and cloud infrastructure. You are not expected to be a specialist in any one layer, you are expected to be dangerous across all of them. You turn ambiguous product and business goals into shipped, production-ready software, mentor engineers across the organization, and bring together composable platforms, cloud infrastructure, and AI-powered experiences into cohesive, scalable solutions. This is not a hands-off leadership role. You will lead by doing, and by raising the technical bar around you.

In this role, you can also expect to be on projects as part of our FDAIC team (Forward Deployed AI Consultant).



This is a multidisciplinary team that includes representation from other departments such as CX, Strategy and Product, all of whom are AI-first in the delivery of their duties. This team does short engagements to uncover areas of growth for Apply within the client, while delivering on near term goals.

Full-Stack Architecture & Technical Vision

Envision and architect end-to-end solutions for complex, enterprise-scale projects — spanning frontend, backend services, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.

Provide clear technical direction across the full stack; ensure quality, coherence, and alignment of all technical solutions with business objectives.

Champion the design and implementation of highly scalable, secure, and maintainable software systems — API-first, cloud-native, and composable by default.

Own technical decisions across layers: from UI and component architecture to service design, data modelling, and infrastructure configuration.

Guide technology decisions that align with both business objectives and Apply's standard of engineering excellence.

Agentic Engineering & AI-Native Delivery

Organize, distribute, and translate backlog requirements into detailed, spec-driven requirements that coding agents can implement autonomously.

Synthesize user stories, site maps, content strategy, design systems,



and brand strategy into specifications that guide agent-driven development.

Apply spec-driven development (e.g. BMAD Method or equivalent) to ensure clarity, consistency, and quality across agent-orchestrated workflows.

Architect full-stack solutions, across UI, APIs, services, and data stores, that integrate seamlessly with AI-powered systems, including LLM APIs, RAG pipelines, and agent orchestration frameworks.

Design both user-facing experiences and backend service contracts that help products express goals, constraints, and context clearly to AI agents.

Integrate AI-powered APIs, LLM-driven features, RAG-based experiences, and AI-assisted developer workflows throughout the full application stack.

Platform, Cloud & Composable Architecture

Design and implement microservices, APIs, and composable architectures using up-to-date cloud platforms (GCP preferred; AWS/Azure experience valued).

Build and maintain backend services, data pipelines, and integrations with composable platforms: Contentful, Contentstack, Algolia, Cloudinary, commercetools, and similar MACH ecosystem products.

Implement enterprise-grade design systems, content models, component libraries, and the backend services that power them.

Ensure systems are performant and well-instrumented across all layers, from client-side rendering and GEO to API latency, caching, and data integrity.

Leverage containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), serverless patterns, and infrastructure-as-code where appropriate.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

Serve as a technical visionary, shaping the engineering culture and raising technical standards across multiple teams and

📌 Principal Agentic Engineer (Toronto)
🏢 Apply
📍 Toronto