AI Software Engineer

About Palona

At Palona, we are building the operating system for restaurants; our mission is to empower every restaurateur to run their restaurant with best-in-class efficiency. Palona builds real-world AI systems that run continuously in production. Our work focuses on AI agents capable of perceiving, reasoning, remembering, and acting in physical environments. Restaurants are extremely complex physical environments for AI to interact with. We are interested in research that can withstand the test of reality and help us understand and act.

Join Our Team in Toronto

Toronto is one of North America's most vibrant culinary cities. There are nearly 10,000 restaurants within the city of Toronto. We are close to our customers. Toronto has proven to be unparalleled in its ability to attract talent focused on fundamental AI research and AI applications. Palona is thrilled to continue expanding our engineering and research teams in Toronto. We hope you can join us at our Toronto office.

Who is a good fit for Palona?

• You consider yourself an AI software engineer of the next generation.
• You are constantly experimenting with the latest AI tools and technologies.
• You believe your productivity is at least 10x that of your peers.
• You are passionate about delivering the best product for customers.
• You want to build a very cool product.
• You care about your team members.

Who might not be a good fit for us?

• You have not had an "aha" moment in AI.
• You do not worry about spending too much money on AI model tokens.
• You do not believe in good software design.
• You are not passionate about making customers happy.

Job Description

We are looking for an AI Software Engineer with a strong track record of building complete end-to-end AI products from scratch in a startup environment. You will design, develop, and deploy autonomous AI systems from ideation to production. We are looking for fast learners who embrace challenges and ship AI products independently in a high-growth, resource-constrained environment. This position requires in-person participation at our downtown Toronto office.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship complete end-to-end AI products and intelligent agents from concept to production.
• Design autonomous systems and multi-agent architectures to solve complex problems.
• Deploy AI agents to production, focusing on reliability and performance, leveraging state-of-the-art AI models (LLMs, VLMs).
• Rapidly prototype and iterate on AI solutions in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Take full ownership of projects and deliver the most impactful results for our customers.

Requirements

Qualifications

• 3+ years of software development experience, with 1+ year in AI product development.
• Familiarity with prototyping and experimenting ideas from 0 to 1 for successful projects.
• Familiarity with today's AI-native workflows, evaluation frameworks, context engineering, agent memory management, and MCP servers.
• Experience in a startup or ability to thrive in a fast-paced, resource-constrained environment.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently and take full ownership of complex projects.

Preferred

• Experience with agent frameworks.
• Fast learner capable of adapting quickly to new technologies and changing requirements.
• Relevant advanced degree (Masters or PhD) in Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, or Natural Language Processing.

Benefits

• Healthcare plan (medical, dental, and vision)
• Paid time off (vacation, sick leave, and public holidays)
• Family leave (maternity, paternity)
• Training and development
• Work from home
• Free food and snacks
• Stock options plan