Engineering Lead, AI Engineer (Applied​/Software), Backend Developer

Protexxa is a Canadian cybersecurity company building a human-risk and credential-exposure platform that helps organizations and their people stay ahead of account takeover and identity-based threats. We’re a small, fast-moving team shipping a real product to real customers — which means high ownership, short paths from idea to production, and engineering decisions that actually stick.

We’re looking for an Engineering Lead to take an AI-powered email-security product from working prototype to production. It’s a cloud-native build on Google Cloud that connects to enterprise mailboxes, scores and quarantines threats at high volume, and puts applied machine learning at the centre of the product. You’ll set technical direction, stay hands‑on across the stack, and lead a small squad of four (including yourself) spanning engineering and ML as you harden the prototype into a commercial‑grade platform.

Security and reliability aren’t a side quest here — they’re the product.

• Level: Senior
• Location & work model: Hybrid — onsite in Toronto, ON
• Employment type: Full‑time
• Reports to: Director, Customer Success & Product

• Lead a small squad of four (including yourself). Set technical direction and standards across engineering and ML, mentor the team, run code review, and own delivery — partnering with product to move the build from prototype toward launch.
• Stay hands‑on. Design and ship services end to end across the stack — backend, integrations, APIs, and the internal dashboards the team runs on.
• Build the GCP‑native pipeline. Event‑driven, serverless services on Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, Firestore, and Secret Manager — moving high daily email volume through risk scoring and quarantine, with the auto‑scaling, alerting, and dead‑letter handling to stay reliable under load.
• Own the email‑platform integrations. Resilient connectors to Microsoft 365 (Graph API) and Gmail / Google Workspace — OAuth and token refresh, batch fetching, retries, and high connector uptime. Prototype coding is C#.
• Put applied AI/ML into production. Wire model serving into the pipeline for threat classification (phishing, BEC, malware, spam) and image‑based fraud detection, partnering closely with ML and data science.
• Support platform integration. Connect the product into Protexxa’s broader cybersecurity platform through clean, API‑driven service boundaries — so the two systems share data and threat signal cleanly.
• Build security and compliance in. SOC 2 readiness and GDPR/PIPEDA — IAM/RBAC, audit logging, encryption, and data‑residency controls as a property of the platform, not an afterthought.

• Years of experience building and shipping production backend or full‑stack systems, with strong Python and its data/ML ecosystem.
• Deep Google Cloud experience — Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Firestore, Pub/Sub, Secret Manager, and IAM — building event‑driven, serverless, high‑throughput services at scale.
• Experience integrating enterprise email or identity platform APIs — Microsoft Graph / Microsoft 365 and/or Gmail / Google Workspace — including OAuth, webhooks, and high‑volume sync.
• Experience shipping applied AI/ML into production (LLMs and/or classical ML classification and model serving), and hands‑on enough with ML to guide the people building the models — not just consume their output.
• Experience running or leading a team — mentoring, technical direction, and owning delivery, including with distributed teams.
• Strong communication and stakeholder skills — you give engineers clear technical direction, collaborate easily with product and customer success, and can explain technical tradeoffs to non‑technical audiences, including in writing for a distributed team.
• Fluency using AI‑powered coding assistants / agentic tools — i.e., Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, KIRO.

• Email security, anti‑phishing, threat detection, or anti‑fraud domain experience.
• Computer vision or image‑similarity / reverse‑image lookup experience.
• Experience in a SOC 2, GDPR, or PIPEDA regulated environment.
• Experience hardening an early build or prototype into a production platform, including…