Principal Game Engineer in Toronto

About Big Viking Games

Big Viking Games exists to make fans. We are a profitable, independent Canadian gaming company focused on building, operating, and growing long-standing online game communities. Our flagship titles, YoWorld and FishWorld, have entertained millions of players over their lifetime. These are enduring live-service virtual worlds with rich in-game economies, virtual goods, deep social interaction, and player communities measured in years, not sessions. We are now rebuilding the company as an AI-first studio. That is not a slogan here. It is an operating standard. AI agents are already changing how we build, test, review, produce, and operate. We believe a small team of exceptional builders, amplified by well-architected AI systems, can outperform teams many times larger.

This role exists to help prove that, operationalize it, and define what the next generation of game development looks like.

About the Role

Big Viking Games is hiring a Principal Engineer, Agentic Products & Workflows to build the systems that make an AI-first game studio real. This is a founding-level engineering seat at the center of our AI transformation. You will help architect and build the agentic platform, autonomous engineering workflows, AI-enabled content pipelines, review systems, integration layers, and observability infrastructure that allow agents to produce reliable, reviewable, production-grade output for live games.

This is not a role for someone who is simply curious about AI. You should already be building with agents, shipping systems, testing workflows, using AI coding tools daily, and developing opinions from real production experience. We care less about pedigree and more about what you have built, how you think, and whether your systems survive contact with real users, real content, real revenue, and real production constraints.

You will own verticals end to end: architecture, orchestration, data models, backend services, APIs, evaluation loops, human review surfaces, observability, quality controls, and the production workflows teams use every day. This is hard in a very specific way. Agentic systems are nondeterministic, tool-driven, context-dependent, and often operating with minimal supervision. When they fail, they can fail quietly, expensively, or at the wrong moment. Your job is to build the infrastructure that makes those systems legible, reliable, recoverable, and trusted. If that problem excites you, this role is built for you.

What You’ll Build

• Autonomous Engineering Platform: The internal platform that lets a small number of engineers safely direct a large amount of autonomous work.
• LiveOps Content Pipelines: The AI-enabled production systems that turn creative direction into production-ready game content at scale.

What You’ll Do

• Architect, build, test, and operate agentic systems that support AI-enabled game production, autonomous engineering, content workflows, and internal tools.
• Own the agentic platform end to end, including orchestration primitives, workflow design, review loops, memory, evaluation, observability, and integration into live-game systems.
• Drive reliability and observability as a first-class product surface.
• Translate ambiguous creative, operational, and engineering goals into clear specifications, scoped plans, and shipped systems.

What You Bring

• Substantial experience shipping and operating production software at scale.
• Strong full stack engineering depth, ideally with TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, SQL, Postgres, APIs, backend services, queues, workers, and production web applications.
• Real experience building agentic systems, autonomous workflows, AI-enabled products, or production AI infrastructure.

AI and Agentic Systems Experience

This is the heart of the role, and the bar is deliberately high. You should be able to demonstrate:

• Agentic systems you have designed, built, shipped, or operated.
• Practical fluency with AI coding agents and multi-agent workflows.
• Clear judgment about where AI can automate work, where human review is required, and where quality cannot be compromised.

Nice to Have Experience

• Experience shipping generative AI or agentic AI features in customer-facing or business-critical production environments.
• Experience with tool orchestration, agent memory, multi-model routing, background workers, queues, event-driven systems, workflow engines, or durable execution.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate is a principal-level builder who wants the ground floor of something consequential. They are comfortable with ambiguity, but they do not leave ambiguity unmanaged. They turn unclear goals into executable specs. They have a high bar, a practical bias, and something to prove.

Compensation

The expected base salary range for this role is CAD $175,000 to $200,000, depending on experience, technical depth, demonstrated agentic systems experience, and overall fit. This role is also eligible for participation in the Employee Stock Option Plan.

Benefits

• Group Retirement Savings Plan matching and participation.
• Comprehensive benefits package, including health, dental, and vision coverage.
• 15 vacation days and 10 wellness days.

Accessibility and Accommodation

Big Viking Games is committed to creating an inclusive and accessible environment for all candidates. We welcome applications from individuals of all abilities and will provide accommodations throughout the hiring process as needed.