Founding Principal Engineer - Workbench

General Information:

Job Title: Founding Principal Engineer - Workbench
Location: Toronto (Onsite/ Hybrid)
Job Type: Full-Time
Hiring Timeline: Immediate
Reporting Line: Head of R&D
Existing Vacancy: Yes
Final date to receive applications: Open until Filled
Salary Range: $175–$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 experts to encode warehouse design knowledge into the platform
• Identify architectural risks early and prevent technical debt accumulation
• Serve as the primary technical owner through the platform's early lifecycle

What Success Looks Like in the First 90 Days:

• 30:
  Deep understanding of the product vision and design domain; initial architecture and standards established; foundational design documentation delivered
• 60:
  Core platform components or MVP foundation delivered; key architecture decisions validated through working production-grade code
• 90:
  Stable platform foundation ready for feature expansion; long-term technical roadmap presented; governance standards for future contributors in place

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

• Delivery of production-ready platform foundation
• Stability and reliability of core architecture
• Reducti…