Senior Full-Stack AI Engineer

**Rhyme** Senior Full-Stack AI Engineer; CA$180,000–CA$250,000 base + equity; Toronto (On-site)

**About Company** Rhyme builds the AI workforce for fintech operations. Legacy fintechs — pre-AI businesses, most of them founded around 2015 — still run their most complex operational workflows by hand: someone opens 40 bank portals every morning to log balances, reconciliation lives in a 50MB spreadsheet only one person understands, and the rules that actually govern decisions sit in people's heads. Rhyme maps that tribal knowledge into a unified ledger graph first, then runs a team of agents on top of it. The agents have memory, check each other's work, stop and ask when they fall below ~99% confidence, and log every decision with full audit lineage. Runa, an early customer, went from four hours of manual reconciliation every morning to two minutes of verification, deployed in 14 days.

Pre-seed and building toward a seed round, backed by Restive, Preface Ventures and Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed), with advisors including Steve Lemon (co-founder of Currencycloud, acquired by Visa). Customers land with one agent and expand across the organisation — net expansion is running at 5.7x, against a SaaS norm closer to 1.2x. There is roughly $7M of inbound pipeline the team does not yet have the engineering capacity to serve. At 350 customers Rhyme is a $100M ARR business, which is around 0.6% of the market it sells into, before moving upmarket to banks where contract values are roughly 3x higher.

Co-founder Alexandra Levy led operations at Google and Dow Jones. The founding engineer was the second engineer at EvenUp, where he watched the company scale from zero to a $2B valuation in under four years.

**About the Role** This hire exists because demand has outrun capacity — signed customers are waiting on engineering. Rhyme is early enough that most of the product is still unbuilt: the pre-seed phase was deliberately manual, and the work now is turning that into a real platform. Whoever joins will own primitives that stay in the product for the life of the company, and will work directly with the founding team on decisions that matter to the business. The first 90 days flex to preference — either forward-deployed with a customer, shipping one of the agents in the queue, or heads-down on the core platform.

**Responsibilities** - Ship agents into production for fintechs that are already signed and waiting, working directly with their operations teams — or focus on core platform work instead, depending on your preference. - Build the company brain: the memory and decision layer that lets each agent start smarter than the last. - Make the architectural calls on a codebase that barely exists yet, and own how those decisions hold up as the business scales. - Solve problems with no prior art, such as how agents share relevant context with each other without exposing data they are not cleared to see. - Turn manual, deliberately unscalable pre-seed processes into productised systems. - Work directly with the founding team on decisions that shape the direction of the company.

**Required Skills** A. 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with real full-stack depth. B. Startup experience at either your current or your immediately previous company — anything up to Series C counts. A background of only large tech companies does not qualify. C. A track record of making architectural decisions that shaped a product, not just executing well-defined tickets. D. Comfortable building from close to zero, with little existing code, evolving requirements and frequent pivots. E. Able and willing to work in TypeScript and Node.js. Your current language does not matter, but ramping into this stack is not optional.

**Bonus Skills** - Fintech, banking or payments background. - Production experience with LLM-powered systems shipped to real users, not demos or prototypes. - Experience in a domain where a wrong output carries real consequences — fintech, healthcare, legal, insurance or security. - Existing depth in TypeScript and Node.js. - Agent architectures, RAG at scale, or evaluation frameworks for production LLM systems. - Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) with the judgment to tell quickly whether the output is worth keeping. - Cloud infrastructure ownership on GCP or AWS at real scale.

**Logistical Info** - Location: Toronto, in the office four days a week. Remote is not an option for this role. - Compensation: CA$180,000–CA$250,000 base plus equity, targeting the 95th percentile. - Number of openings: 1 - **Other:** Commuting costs to the office covered. Lunch provided on office days. Healthcare. Unlimited holiday.

**Ideal Background** - Seniority calibration: 8+ years is the stated bar. Alexandra will flex to 6 years, but only where someone joined a startup very early, out of university, and picked up real architectural responsibility fast. Below 6 years is a hard no. - Startup definition: seed through Series C all count. It must be the current or penultimate company — no further back than two companies ago. Big tech does not count, and she named Airbnb specifically as an example that does not. - Strongest signal — AI companies shipping into regulated or high-stakes industries: EvenUp, Harvey, Decagon, Sierra, Casetext, Hebbia, Squint. - Also strong — fintech and payments startups, and engineers who have turned tribal knowledge or manual operations into structured, automated processes. Alexandra flagged Squint's positioning as close to identical to Rhyme's. - Geography: she wants both education and work experience from North America, Western Europe, South America or Israel. This is not a pedigree filter — she was explicit she does not need MIT — but she wants degrees from countries with strong, highly-ranked education systems. Engineers who went to San Francisco and came back to Toronto are a good pattern. - Brand: ideally at least one recognisable company somewhere in the history. Not a requirement, but she will not know most early-stage names, and one known brand helps her calibrate the rest. - Comp note: the band is CA$180K–CA$250K. Above CA$250K is not an automatic no, but she will only go there for someone she reads as a 10x performer. She said she would still talk to a candidate at ~US$200K (≈CA$270K). A candidate expecting CA$350K+ is out of range. - Screening ask: Alexandra specifically asked recruiters to vouch for craft obsession — how deeply the person cares about being excellent at engineering, and how much energy they put into it. It does not show up on a CV and she can only read it in conversation.

**Green Flags** - Obsessive about craft — visibly cares about being very good at engineering, with real intellectual curiosity. - Founder mentality in the healthy sense: cares whether the business succeeds and makes decisions accordingly, with high ownership. - Two or more years at each company, with the results of their own decisions visible. - Joined a company very early and grew with it into real responsibility. - One prior founding attempt, followed by a genuine return to being an employee and staying put. - Thrives in chaos, frequent pivots and the absence of a spec. - Motivated by owning core primitives that persist for the life of the company.

**Red Flags** - No startup experience, or startup experience more than two companies back. Big-tech-only careers — Amazon, Stripe, Airbnb and similar — are a reject. - Serial founder flight risk: a pattern of building a startup, running out of money, taking a job for around ten months, then leaving to start the next thing. Alexandra rejects this at CV stage as too much of a risk. - Consulting, freelance, contracting or self-employed-heavy history. - More than two short stints. One or two are normal and not a concern on their own. - CV dishonesty — dressing up a certificate or short course as a degree from a better-known university. She treats this as an integrity issue, and is explicit that a community college background owned honestly is not a problem. - Unwilling to learn TypeScript and Node.js, as distinct from not knowing them today. - Fewer than 6 years of experience. - Comp expectations meaningfully above CA$250K, unless the profile reads as a 10x performer. CA$350K+ is out of range. - Education or work history outside North America, Western Europe, South America or Israel.

**Interview Process** 1. Culture and background interview (45 min) with Alexandra Levy, co-founder — how you have worked through past situations, plus time for your questions about the business. 2. Systems design interview with one of the engineers. The questions differ depending on whether you are tracking as an AI full-stack or a full-stack engineer. 3. Take-home exercise — a Git repo containing an abstracted version of real Rhyme work. You can raise questions about it during the systems design interview. 4. Debrief on the take-home — the decisions you made, what you would change with more time, and what you would want to investigate further. 5. Offer.