Principal Software Engineer

Principal Software Engineer Location: Fully Remote, Within Canada (Eastern Time Zone ± 1 hour) Role Type: Full-time, Permanent Reports to: Senior Vice President, Engineering About The Role Our client is a scaling start-up developing AI-enabled physical security solutions and is seeking a highly capable, hands-on generalist Staff or Principal Software Engineer to join their core technical team. In this role, you will be instrumental in developing and scaling AI-powered video surveillance detection pipeline, leveraging state-of-the-art computer vision models to achieve sub-one-second detection latency at scale. This is an individual contributor role focused on execution, architecture, and problem-solving rather than management. You will thrive if you enjoy working full-stack across complex systems, navigating ambiguity, pivoting quickly, and building high-impact products with low organizational overhead. Key Responsibilities Architect, build, and optimize backend services and processing pipelines using Python, Linux, and PostgreSQL. Integrate, test, and evaluate open-source AI/Vision-Language Models for real-time video surveillance and detection workflows. Solve performance bottlenecks to achieve sub-one-second latency at scale while maintaining low false-positive rates. Maintain hands-on involvement across the entire stack, leveraging AI-assisted workflows such as Claude Code to accelerate development. Participate in peer reviews, architecture discussions, and calibration of d