Founding AI Quality & Release Engineer

Canada, United States
Remote
Posted Aug 21, 2026
1 position

US$170,000–US$200,000 / year

Opens an external site

Employment type: Full-time
Experience level: Lead · 10+ years
Posting language: English
Working hours: 40 hours per week
Location requirements: Country, Canada

Job summary

You will own the verification and release system, utilizing AI-powered test harnesses and LLM graders to ensure high-quality software delivery. Additionally, you will manage CI health, artifact publication, and deployment pipelines to maintain reliable staging and demo environments.

Job details

Our client is a seed-stage enterprise AI company building autonomous data agents that execute complex engineering workflows inside customer-controlled cloud environments. Founded by early employees of a leading cloud data platform, the approximately 20-person team helps data organizations compress work that once took months into hours. This is the company's first dedicated quality-infrastructure hire. It is a software engineering role, not a traditional manual QA position. You will write code most days and own the verification and release system that carries every build from merge to customer. Roughly 70% of the role is AI-powered verification through agent-run test harnesses, LLM graders, regression coverage, flake management, and automated release gates. Roughly 30% is release and environment engineering across CI health, artifact publication, deployment pipelines, and reliable demo and staging environments. You will eliminate silent skips, build fresh-install and upgrade verification, turn escaped bugs into permanent regression tests, expand natural-language UAT executed by coding agents, own release candidates and artifact publication, automate credentials and certificates, and make release readiness visible through trusted system evidence. • 7 to 15 years in quality engineering, release engineering, platform engineering, developer productivity, SDET-adjacent engineering, or a similar software role. • Production-quality Python and strong software engineering fundamentals. • Deep fluency with GitHub Actions or an equivalent CI system. • Genuine interest and practical judgment in LLM-driven and agent-driven verification. • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, AWS, cloud deployment mechanics, secrets, credentials, and certificates. • High ownership and clear technical communication through runbooks, dashboards, retrospectives, and operating policies. • Full work authorization in either the United States or Canada. Visa sponsorship and transfer support are not available. Nice to have: TypeScript, Snowflake Native Apps, Playwright, LLM-as-judge or grader design, nondeterministic system testing, and early-stage startup quality infrastructure. • $170,000 to $200,000 base salary, based on qualifications and experience. • Competitive equity and benefits. • Remote-first across the United States and Canada. • Periodic team offsites and flexible hybrid access to the New York City office for local team members. • High ownership over a founding technical function at a $5M-funded enterprise AI company.

What you’ll do

Requirements

Candidates must have 7 to 15 years of experience in quality, release, or platform engineering with strong Python proficiency. You must also possess deep fluency in CI systems and practical experience with cloud infrastructure like Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS.