Senior / Staff Engineer - Applied AI

This posting reflects a current, actively recruited opening at Float. All applications are being reviewed on a rolling basis.

About Float

Float is on a mission to simplify finance for Canadian businesses, empowering them to eliminate complexity and unlock new opportunities. Through our innovative platform, Float enables businesses to streamline financial operations and optimize cash flow, so they can focus on what matters most: growth.

As one of Canada’s fastest growing companies and top-rated startups in 2025, 2024 and 2023, Float is customer-obsessed, passionate and entrepreneurial, with a team that includes leaders from Uber, Stripe, Shopify, Top Hat, Ada, Doordash, Snowflake, and Wealthsimple.

At Float, everyone is an owner, bringing their unique perspective to our team and product. Your voice is important, and we take having a culture based on feedback seriously. We openly share our thoughts and differing opinions so we can continue to improve. We do our best to keep our decision-making decentralized so that all team members feel ownership in our success.

Our Product

Float is Canada’s intelligent financial operating system, combining modern financial services and software to help businesses spend, save, and grow. Trusted by more than 10,000 Canadian companies, Float provides high-limit corporate cards, automated expense management, next-day bill payments, high-yield accounts, and industry-leading support, all built in Canada, for Canada. Float recently announced our $85 million Series C, and is backed by world-class investors, including Inovia Capital, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, OMERS Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank.

Our team is a collection of ambitious, collaborative and mission-driven people from all walks of life but with one goal: helping Canadian companies not just survive but thrive. And we’re looking for bold innovators to help shape the future of business finance in Canada.

AI Use in Our Hiring Process

We use technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), to support parts of our hiring process. This may include AI-assisted scheduling and candidate communications, and AI-generated interview notes, guides or summaries to help our team focus on the conversation. All hiring decisions are made by our hiring team.

About the Role

Float is building an agent that works as a chief financial officer for every Canadian business: it knows the business, has all the context, and works around the clock. You would join the small team building the foundation for it, with a blank slate and a direct line to the product teams that will build on what you make.

You’ll have the best seat in the house on how to apply the frontier to real finance problems: taking raw model intelligence and turning it into durable, scalable, useful products. The team sits between the model providers, Float’s product teams, and the customers whose finances we run, building the harness —memory, skills, tools, evals, observability, distribution channels — that every agent at Float runs on.

This is a zero-to-one position. You will build the core pieces that let agents act reliably in production, and the interfaces and channels customers reach them through, then scale them across Float’s products. The field is moving quickly, so the best people here learn fast and are glad to rebuild something when a better approach arrives.

We are hiring across multiple levels for this role. Our interview process evaluates scope, judgment and learning velocity, and we level accordingly. At Staff, you set the patterns the harness is built on and the evaluation and observability bar every agent at Float meets. This role suits engineers who have shipped agents to real users, want more ownership than a large company can offer, and like to build.

What You'll Be Responsible For

• Ship agents that save customers real money and time. Take them from the first prototype to production at scale, and own the outcome once they’re live.

• Build the unified harness. Context management, capabilities and tool use, evaluation, monitoring and observability — the layer every agent at Float runs on and scales through.

• Make agent actions safe to trust with a company’s money. Permissions, approvals, audit trails, and clear behaviour when the agent is uncertain or wrong.

• Define what good looks like and measure it. Offline evals, production monitoring of agent decisions, and the loop that turns incidents into improvements.

• Build the interfaces agents are delivered through. Chat, generative UI, and multiple channels at once.

• Make product teams faster. Partner with them so they can launch their own agent capabilities on the harness without rebuilding it.

• Stay on the frontier. Track models, inference and context management, and rework what we’ve built when a better approach appears.

• Representative projects:

  • Build the approval and audit layer that lets an agent pay a bill on a customer’s behalf.

  • Stand up the evaluation framework that tells us, before and after launch, whether an agent’s answers about a company’s spend are correct.

  • Give agents the context of a whole business — cards, bills, accounts, accounting integrations — in a form that stays accurate and token-efficient.

  • Ship the tooling that enables a product team to launch agentic capabilities without our help.

About You

Here's what sets you up for success at Float:

• You Put Customers First, Always. You care deeply about delivering meaningful value. Whether you're building internal systems or customer-facing features, you're always thinking about how to make life better for our users.

• You Act Like an Owner. You take responsibility for outcomes, step up to challenges, and seek solutions proactively—doing what's best for the business, not just your role.

• You Think Big and Move Fast. You're energized by building from 0 to 1. You're not afraid to challenge the status quo, experiment quickly, and learn as you go.

• You Constantly Learn and Grow. You're hungry to improve your craft and open to feedback. You bring a growth mindset to everything you do.

• You Raise the Bar. You care about doing things well and efficiently. You balance speed with rigor and always look for ways to improve how we work.

• You Win as a Team. You're a generous collaborator who values communication, context, and shared wins. You lift others up and help make the team stronger.

You may be a good fit if you have:

• Experience building and shipping agents or LLM-backed systems to production, and running them there: monitoring, improving and scaling them. Typically 5+ years of software engineering for Senior, 8+ for Staff, with a track record of technical leadership across teams at Staff.

• Depth in one of two areas: full-stack product engineering for agentic experiences, or backend engineering for LLM pipelines and agent infrastructure.

• Hands-on, current knowledge of frontier models, inference and context management, and opinions about what works.

• Comfort giving agents capabilities and context and then observing them, rather than specifying every step.

• Experience at more than one company stage, or in a company growing quickly, with major ownership and impact.

• A habit of building things nobody asked you for, and finishing them.

• Curiosity, and the willingness to start over when the field moves.

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience as a founder, founding engineer, or early engineer on a major initiative inside a larger company.

• Experience building systems that move money or make decisions people are accountable for — fintech, payments, or other regulated products.

• Experience designing evaluation frameworks for LLM systems, including LLM-as-judge and human-in-the-loop labelling.

This may not be the role for you if:

• You prefer a defined roadmap and a fully specified process.

• You have spent your whole career in a large company and want similar scope here.

• You are attached to approaches you have already built and would rather defend them than replace them.

• You are looking for a role where AI is a side tool rather than the core of the work.

Our Hiring Philosophy

We hire for character, curiosity, and learning velocity before credentials. Titles matter less than impact, and every hire is expected to raise the bar for Float as a whole.

Why You Should Join

• Be part of an award winning company: we're one of Canada’s Top Growing Companies 2026 according to Report on Business, and Deloitte’s Technology Fast50 2026

• Make a real impact in a high-autonomy, high-growth role

• Collaborate with an ambitious and supportive team

• Competitive compensation, equity options, and benefits

• Hybrid work model: we are based in Toronto with in-office days for connection and collaboration

• Enjoy catered team lunches every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday

• Bring your pup to our dog-friendly office

• Thrive in a high-trust, high-performance culture where your work truly matters

In Short

At Float, you’ll thrive if you’re bold, curious, and eager to make a real impact. We're building something special—and having a lot of fun along the way. If you’re excited to build, grow, and win together, we’d love to meet you.

Protect yourself from recruiting scams. Float only contacts candidates from @floatfinancial.com addresses and schedules interviews through Ashby or Float calendar invites. We will never ask you to install software, pay a fee, buy equipment or share bank or card details. If something looks off, don't engage.

We’re committed to building a workplace that’s welcoming and accessible for everyone. If you need any accommodations during the hiring process or once you join Float, just let us know! You can reach out to Vic([email protected]), and we’ll work with you to make sure you have what you need to succeed.