About this role
General Information: Job Title: Principal Engineer Location: Toronto (Onsite/ Hybrid) Job Type: Full-Time Hiring Timeline: Immediate Reporting Line: Head of R&D Existing Vacancy: Yes Application Deadline: Open until Filled Salary Range: $180K - 210K CAD per year (negotiable)
About Fulfillment IQ (FIQ): Fulfillment IQ is a supply chain engineering and transformation company that helps brands, retailers, and 3PLs design, build, and scale high-performance logistics operations. We work at the intersection of strategy, operations, and technology where we solve complex, real-world problems across warehouse design, automation, order management, transportation, and end-to-end supply chain execution. Our teams combine deep domain expertise with strong technical capability, delivering outcomes through consulting, systems implementation, and proprietary platforms that accelerate time-to-value and reduce delivery risk. If you enjoy working in complex environments, partnering closely with clients, and seeing your work make a tangible impact on how global commerce moves, this is the place where your skills and judgment truly come to life.
Role Overview Workbench is a new FIQ platform that automates complex warehouse design: turning real-world requirements, constraints, and operational data into designs that today demand weeks of expert manual work. This is a 0-to-1 founding role. You will be the founding technical owner: designing the core architecture, making the foundational technology decisions, and writing the production code that the early team builds on. As the platform matures, the role evolves into long-term technical ownership and system stewardship. It blends deep engineering execution with architectural responsibility and product-level technical decision-making.
Must Have:
• 10+ years building cloud-native backend or platform systems • Proven 0-to-1 delivery: took a product or platform from nothing to production and owned the architecture calls yourself • Strong hands-on experience designing and building distributed systems • Ability to translate ambiguous business requirements into production-ready systems • Modern cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines • Strong fundamentals across system design, performance, reliability, and maintainability • Comfort operating in high-ownership, low-process, early-stage environments • Proficiency in Python/FastAPI
Nice to Have:
• Experience shipping AI/LLM-driven capabilities in production (requirement extraction, generation pipelines, agentic workflows) • Workflow engines, orchestration systems, or DAG-based processing platforms • Optimization, simulation, or computational design systems (layout, constraint solving) • Supply chain, logistics, or warehouse operations domain • Prior founding engineer or early platform team roles • Python and TypeScript/Next.js on Azure; you will shape where the stack goes from here
Key Responsibilities:
• Own end-to-end technical design and implementation of the Workbench platform • Make foundational decisions on architecture, data models, and technology • Build core services, APIs, and the automation workflows at the heart of the product • Establish development standards, CI/CD, and engineering practices for the team forming around you • Rapidly prototype and validate architectural decisions through real implementations • Work directly with domain exper