Junior AI Engineer

📋 Description

• • Hotspex Media Inc. is seeking a motivated and eager Junior AI Engineer to join our innovative team, contributing to the development and enhancement of AI support workflows designed to improve work-life balance and deliver superior, differentiated services to both internal users and clients. This is a production-focused role offering a unique opportunity to learn and grow within a dynamic environment, working closely with senior engineers to bridge the gap between software engineering and applied mathematics. You will play a crucial role in building the core AI infrastructure for a leading media agency, ranked #1 on Clutch.co and a finalist for the 2024 Digiday Technology Awards for 'Best AI Tool'. We are committed to your professional development, providing direct mentorship and a clear growth path towards full ownership and autonomy.
• • Reporting directly to the Director of AI & ML, you will be part of a small, high-autonomy team with direct access to leadership. The role is hybrid, with one day per week in the office, and offers the flexibility of remote work for candidates located outside the Greater Toronto Area, provided they are legally authorized to work and based in Canada. Your contributions will have a direct impact, as you will gain ownership over key services that power automated digital advertising analytics and optimization tools, supporting a roadmap of exciting projects aimed at benefiting our team and clients.
• • As a Junior AI Engineer, your primary responsibility will be to rapidly master the fundamentals of our core AI services, develop technical ownership, and consistently deliver production-ready code within our sophisticated Rust-based AI systems. You will actively leverage modern AI-powered coding assistants, such as Claude and Cursor, alongside other internal AI tools, to significantly accelerate your daily coding tasks, facilitate rapid prototyping, and uphold the highest standards of code quality. Effective communication is paramount; you will be expected to clearly document system architectures and translate complex technical decisions into understandable terms for both your engineering peers and non-technical stakeholders, including campaign managers and analysts.
• • Furthermore, you will contribute to maintaining and extending our Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline using GitHub Actions. This involves managing parallel testing across 10 distinct libraries and overseeing selective deployments to our 6 production services, ensuring a robust and efficient release process. Your role will involve close collaboration with senior engineers and the Director of AI & ML, providing invaluable exposure to system design principles, optimization theory, and the best practices essential for large-scale production engineering.
• • You will contribute to the entire lifecycle of our services, from initial development through deployment and ongoing operation. This includes learning and applying best practices for scaling services, implementing effective monitoring strategies, and participating in incident response protocols. A key aspect of your role will be supporting the design and construction of complex data pipelines. These pipelines will ingest data from over 10 external marketing and data platforms, including Google Ads, Meta, and LinkedIn, utilizing our MCP (Model Context Protocol) router servers to feed into a final dimensional data model within Postgres.
• • You will implement and advance our RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) Search Service as part of the Smart Vectorization Roadmap. This involves implementing vector similarity search with sophisticated metadata filtering, contributing to the development of hybrid retrieval strategies, and designing LLM applications for our internal tools. Your responsibilities will also extend to data engineering, where you will design schemas and write dbt models to transform raw marketing platform data into conformed dimensional schemas (following Kimball-style facts and dimensions) in Postgres. You will also contribute to system design by developing internal APIs (REST + JSON-RPC), defining error handling patterns, and creating shared library interfaces within our multi-crate Rust workspace.
• • A significant part of your learning and contribution will involve applied mathematics. You will learn and apply core principles of optimization theory and statistical reasoning to solve real-world business challenges, with direct mentorship from the Director of AI & ML. Additionally, you will support the implementation and maintenance of n8n workflow orchestration, ensuring seamless coordination of service calls, effective retry mechanisms, robust alerting, and efficient cross-service data flows. This role is designed for an engineer who is passionate about building production systems, not a dedicated researcher, consultant, or pure DevOps specialist. Your focus will be on writing production code and contributing to AI systems, with opportunities to research new techniques for specific project deliverables.