Principal Engineer, Agentic Products & Workflows

Big Viking Games • Toronto, ON

2h • CA$175,000 - CA$200,000

About The Position

Big Viking Games is rebuilding the company as an AI-first studio, and this role is central to that transformation. The Principal Engineer, Agentic Products & Workflows will architect and build the systems that make an AI-first game studio a reality. This includes the agentic platform, autonomous engineering workflows, AI-enabled content pipelines, review systems, integration layers, and observability infrastructure. The role requires hands-on experience with AI agents, shipping systems, and developing opinions from real production experience. The successful candidate will own verticals end-to-end, focusing on making agentic systems legible, reliable, recoverable, and trusted. The position involves building and owning systems for an Autonomous Engineering Platform and LiveOps Content Pipelines, ensuring quality and reliability of AI-generated output for live games.

Requirements

• Substantial experience shipping and operating production software at scale.
• Strong full stack engineering depth, ideally with TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, SQL, Postgres, APIs, backend services, queues, workers, and production web applications.
• Experience owning products, platforms, or systems end to end, not just one layer of someone else’s stack.
• Real experience building agentic systems, autonomous workflows, AI-enabled products, or production AI infrastructure.
• Daily, fluent use of AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar tools as part of how you work.
• Strong first-principles engineering judgment. You can defend your architecture choices without hiding behind a framework.
• Experience with orchestration, tool use, task planning, state management, context management, retrieval, workflow reliability, and human review systems.
• Experience building or operating evals, traces, guardrails, test harnesses, quality checks, or other systems that make AI output measurable and trustworthy.
• Comfort with nondeterministic systems, ambiguous requirements, and failures that require deep investigation across unfamiliar stacks.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to identify when generated output is wrong, incomplete, fragile, off-brand, unsafe, or subtly low quality.
• A high bar for reliability, maintainability, observability, documentation, and developer experience.
• Disciplined git, pull request, code review, testing, deployment, and production operations practices, whether the author is human or agent.
• Ability to mentor other engineers, set patterns, and raise the technical bar around you.
• High agency, high urgency, and a builder’s mindset. You move fast without confusing speed with sloppiness.
• Agentic systems you have designed, built, shipped, or operated.
• Practical fluency with AI coding agents and multi-agent workflows.
• Understanding of model behavior, including context windows, retrieval failure modes, grounding gaps, hallucination patterns, calibration, prompt design, and spec design.
• Experience with structured generation, tool calls, function calling, schema-constrained output, approval workflows, and automated review.
• Experience with eval suites, regression tests, quality measurement, observability, and production monitoring for AI systems.
• Clear judgment about where AI can automate work, where human review is required, and where quality cannot be compromised.
• Systems that run when you are away from the keyboard and the instrumentation to trust them.
• Evidence that other people’s output improved because of infrastructure, tools, workflows, or platforms you built.

Nice To Haves

• Experience shipping generative AI or agentic AI features in customer-facing or business-critical production environments.
• Experience with MCP, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Vercel AI SDK, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, LangChain, or similar AI development ecosystems.
• Experience with tool orchestration, agent memory, multi-model routing, background workers, queues, event-driven systems, workflow engines, or durable execution.
• Experience building internal tools for creative production, game operations, content pipelines, asset generation, QA automation, or media workflows.
• Experience with art, animation, asset pipelines, Flash, Animate, or creative tooling.
• Strong visual judgment and the ability to push generated content toward better quality, consistency, and production value.
• Experience in gaming, live-service products, virtual worlds, social games, free-to-play games, high-DAU consumer products, or other production environments where reliability and quality matter every day.
• Experience with observability tools, distributed-systems reliability, incident response, cost telemetry, or production platform operations.
• Zero-to-one, founding-engineer, or early-stage platform-building experience.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, test, and operate agentic systems that support AI-enabled game production, autonomous engineering, content workflows, and internal tools.
• Own the agentic platform end to end, including orchestration primitives, workflow design, review loops, memory, evaluation, observability, and integration into live-game systems.
• Choose and defend the right orchestration pattern for each problem, including sequential, parallel, swarm, planner-executor, tool-using, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Build systems where agents can safely use tools, call APIs, interact with repositories, retrieve context, modify assets, generate structured outputs, and escalate when they should not proceed.
• Design guardrails, validation layers, eval suites, review gates, approval flows, and recovery paths that keep autonomous output at production quality.
• Build human-in-the-loop systems that preserve human judgment where it matters without turning every workflow into manual review.
• Drive reliability and observability as a first-class product surface.
• Ship against outcomes that matter: cost per asset, quality and rework rate, throughput, review speed, placement speed, escaped-defect rate, uptime, and production trust.
• Translate ambiguous creative, operational, and engineering goals into clear specifications, scoped plans, and shipped systems.
• Partner directly with creative AI, engineering, product, design, art, live operations, QA, and leadership to find the highest-leverage problems and solve them.
• Make our codebases, tools, documentation, and workflows more legible to both humans and agents.
• Set the engineering bar for agentic development at BVG through architecture, review standards, documentation, patterns, and mentorship.
• Use AI coding agents as a core part of your daily workflow, directing them, reviewing their output, and building infrastructure that makes them more useful for everyone.
• Help define a practical AI-first engineering culture focused on speed, quality, reliability, and measurable business impact.

Benefits

• Group Retirement Savings Plan matching and participation.
• Comprehensive benefits package, including health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Health and Wellness spending account.
• 15 vacation days.
• 10 wellness days.
• A founding-level seat on the systems that will define how an AI-first game studio operates.
• Exposure to live-service games, content production, game operations, internal platform development, and autonomous engineering workflows.
• A high-ownership role with meaningful influence over how AI is adopted across the company.
• A leadership team that is all-in on practical AI adoption, not performative AI theatre.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed