AI Builder

AI Engineer — Product & Agents
Location: Toronto, Canada — hybrid preferred; remote within Canada considered
Type: Full-time
Compensation: Competitive salary plus meaningful early-stage equity

About Kora
Kora is building an AI-powered operating system for family life.
Modern families manage an overwhelming stream of calendars, school messages, appointments, activities, errands, meals, travel plans, and last-minute changes. The information is scattered across conversations, emails, apps, documents, and people’s heads—and one person often carries most of the mental load.
Kora turns that fragmented information into coordinated action.
Families can tell Kora what is happening through voice, chat, photos, forwarded messages, calendars, and connected services. Kora understands the context, remembers what matters, organizes commitments, identifies conflicts, and proactively helps the family prepare and follow through.
Our product combines:
An AI-powered mobile experience
A dedicated home display designed for shared family use
A contextual family memory and commitment system
Proactive agents that help families plan, coordinate, and act
We are a Toronto-based, VC-backed startup building both hardware and software. We are still a very small, founder-led team, which means the people joining now will have an unusually large influence on the product, technology, and company.

The Role
We are looking for a highly product-minded Founding AI Engineer to help build the intelligence behind Kora.
You will work directly with the founders across the entire product stack—from agent architecture and backend infrastructure to user-facing experiences on mobile and our dedicated hardware.
This is not a narrow machine-learning research role. You will design agents, write production software, talk to users, evaluate real-world behavior, and ship complete features. You should be equally interested in what the system should do, how it should feel to a family, and how to make it reliable in production.
You will help answer questions such as:
How should Kora convert an unstructured conversation, email, screenshot, or voice request into a reliable family commitment?
How should an agent remember family context without becoming intrusive or incorrect?
When should Kora act proactively, ask for confirmation, or stay quiet?
How do we orchestrate models, tools, memory, and workflows across thousands of families?
How do we make a probabilistic AI system feel dependable enough for everyday family life?
How should intelligence move naturally between a phone, a shared home display, voice, and future interfaces?

What You’ll Build
Kora’s agent architecture, orchestration layer, and execution harness
Context, memory, and retrieval systems for understanding each family
A family commitment graph that connects people, events, tasks, responsibilities, locations, and dependencies
Tool-calling workflows for calendars, reminders, email, tasks, shopping, travel, and other family services
Evaluation systems for measuring agent quality, reliability, latency, and cost
Guardrails, confirmation flows, observability, and recovery mechanisms for production agents
Real-time voice and conversational experiences
Backend services, APIs, databases, queues, and event-driven workflows
User-facing features across our React Native apps and Android-based home display
Rapid prototypes that can be tested with real families and turned into production features

What You’ll Do
Own important product problems from initial idea through production deployment
Work directly with the founders to define product behavior and technical direction
Build prototypes quickly, test them with users, and iterate based on evidence
Design reliable agent workflows rather than relying on prompts alone
Select and integrate the right models, tools, retrieval methods, and infrastructure
Create datasets, test cases, simulations, and evaluations for agent behavior
Improve system quality while managing latency, inference cost, privacy, and complexity
Contribute across backend, frontend, infrastructure, and device software when necessary
Establish engineering practices for a growing technical team
Help recruit and mentor future engineers

What We’re Looking For
Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production systems
Hands-on experience building applications with modern LLMs and agentic workflows
Strong Python skills and experience building backend services and APIs
Comfort working with databases, data models, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems
Ability to work across the stack and learn unfamiliar technologies quickly
Experience evaluating and debugging probabilistic AI systems
Excellent product judgment and empathy for non-technical users
A strong sense of ownership—you identify what needs to happen and drive it to completion
Comfort operating in an early-stage environment with ambiguity, speed, and changing priorities
Clear written and verbal communication

Especially Valuable
You do not need to have everything below, but experience in any of these areas would be valuable:
Agent orchestration, tool use, structured outputs, planning, or multi-step workflows
LLM evaluation, tracing, observability, fine-tuning, or synthetic data generation
Long-term memory, knowledge graphs, retrieval systems, or event-driven architectures
React Native, TypeScript, Kotlin, or Jetpack Compose
PostgreSQL, Firebase, GCP, queues, and cloud-native infrastructure
Real-time voice systems, speech recognition, text-to-speech, or LiveKit
Consumer mobile products, connected devices, or hardware-software experiences
Privacy-sensitive products involving families or personal information

How We Work
We are looking for someone who is:
AI-native: You use modern AI tools as part of your everyday engineering workflow and continuously look for ways to improve your leverage.
Product-oriented: You care about the user’s outcome, not just whether the code works.
A builder: You are happiest t