Careers / Principle Engineer / VP of Engineering Principle Engineer / VP of Engineering Location: Remote.

Reports to: Founder (product direction) and General Manager (cadence and priorities) Team: 4 engineers plus contractors today. co redefines the way marketers engage with ads—empowering them to save ads into a personalized swipe file, curate briefs, and spy on competitors’ entire ad libraries. Founded in 2021, Foreplay is a fast-growing, bootstrapped, and profitable SaaS company building the future of ad creative workflows. Based in Toronto, Canada, with a fully remote team across multiple countries, we’re a scrappy and fast-moving startup focused on helping marketers discover, analyze, organize, and leverage the best-performing ads.

Today, more than 10,000 marketers, brands, and agencies use Foreplay to make their creative research and advertising workflows faster and more effective.

You inherit a real distributed system: an event-driven pipeline that ingests about 2 million new unique ads a day from public ad libraries, enriches them on a self-hosted GPU fleet (transcription, creative classification, embeddings), and projects them into a 220-million-document semantic search index, a 50-billion-row ClickHouse warehouse, and a public API and MCP server that sell the corpus as data. Alongside it sits Lens, a performance-analytics product that pulls directly from Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn ad accounts and compiles metric definitions into ClickHouse SQL at query time. It runs on about 80 bare-metal servers, across roughly 40 services and 70 repositories, in Node, Python, and Vue.

Your job is to make it boring to operate, retire what should be retired, and ship on top of it faster than we ever have, using agents to do most of the typing. We believe software development has changed permanently, and that the teams who win will be the ones who direct agents well, not the ones who type fastest.



You will lead that shift here.

You decide what gets consolidated, what gets retired, and what gets left alone. You own uptime, cost, and the fact that nobody at Foreplay should learn about an outage from a customer. Work is scoped as projects and jobs-to-be-done in Linear today; Shipping You work with the founder and GM on what gets built, then you make sure it ships.

You will personally ship things customers can see. At least 5 years shipping production code before coding agents existed. Fully bought in on agentic software development, with a specific and defensible opinion on how agent-driven work should be scoped, implemented, reviewed, and scaled. “Still in the code and planning to stay there.

You are comfortable running agents across many repositories at once, and you know the difference between that and typing in one. Language-agnostic. Our stack is Node, Python, and Vue on Cloudflare, Kafka, ClickHouse, Postgres, MySQL, Firestore, and Elasticsearch.

You should recognize most of it, but what matters is that you can read an unfamiliar codebase, ship a correct change in it, and leave the language choice alone. You have operated event-driven or streaming systems at scale, and when something is one machine with no replica, you can draw the design that survives losing it, state the trade-off, and pick one. You default to shipping.

You want to build and lead a small, senior team, and you know how to do it without adding ceremony.

Bonus Points





You have led through the shift from manual to agent-driven development somewhere else. You think planning is the most productive way to avoid failure, or you treat structure as a substitute for output. You are romantic about traditional software development and think of AI-written code as a compromise.

You want to spend more time managing people than building product & ops. When you change how the pipeline works, you change what the world's best marketers see the next morning. Ship on Tuesday, watch them use it Wednesday, hear about it in Intercom Thursday.

You own the platform, the team, and the way software gets built here. Nobody above you will second-guess a technical call you can defend. You’ll define what an AI-first engineering team actually looks like.

Not a pilot, not a policy doc. A real team, a real codebase, real customers, and a mandate to make agents do the typing while humans do the thinking. Most engineers will spend the next five years adapting to this shift.

Compensation: Competitive base plus an uncapped performance bonus tied directly to company growth. You have shipped one thing customers can see or feel. Something pages a human before a customer notices.

The development process has shifted to AI-first and AI-led. At least one legacy generation of the platform has been retired. We ship measurably faster than before you arrived, and infrastructure costs less.

Data processing, and infrastructure costs are not linear and the company is shipping more, faster with more platform reliability. You make a technical call nobody asked you to make, and the platform is faster, cheaper, or more reliable because of it. You have a document about the architecture and no commits.

Agents are your personal productivity tool, not the team’s process. The team is more organized and ships slower. We still learn about outages from customers.

📌 Principle Engineer / Vp Of Engineering (Toronto)
🏢 Foreplay
📍 Toronto