Principal Engineer, Agentic Products & Workflows

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.

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.

You will build and own systems across two flagship workstreams.

The internal platform that lets a small number of engineers safely direct a large amount of autonomous work.

This includes:

• Orchestration primitives for multi-agent multi-model workflows including routing scheduling state management memory task decomposition and recovery.
• Autonomous engineering workflows that can take a scoped ticket toward a reviewed tested pull request.
• AI-to-AI review layers where agents critique test validate and gate each others output before a human needs to intervene.
• Self-healing workflows with retries escalation paths rollback recovery and failure classification.
• Cross-agent memory and calibration systems so knowledge compounds instead of disappearing between runs.
• Prediction and confidence systems that help agents know when to proceed when to ask and when to stop.
• Evaluation infrastructure test harnesses traces metrics and dashboards that catch hallucinations regressions grounding gaps quality drift and cost spikes before they reach production.
• Integration layers that connect agents safely to codebases tickets repositories data sources tools documentation and production workflows.

The AI-enabled production systems that turn creative direction into production-ready game content at scale.

This includes:

• Content generation workflows that produce structured reviewable output aligned to YoWorld FishWorld and our quality standards.
• Human review surfaces where designers artists product managers and live operations teams can steer approve reject revise and improve generated content.
• Prompt and spec composition systems that make quality repeatable rather than dependent on individual heroics.
• Audit retry versioning and approval infrastructure so every input output revision decision and release step is tracked and recoverable.
• Tooling that helps creative and production teams move faster without lowering the bar.
• Integration layers that move approved content safely into live game workflows.

You will own the quality of what these systems produce not just the plumbing that moves data around.

• 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.
• Choose and defend the right orchestration pattern for each problem including sequential parallel swarm planner-executor tool-using and human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Build systems where agents can safely use tools call APIs interact with repositories retrieve context modify assets generate structured outputs and escalate when they should not proceed.
• Design guardrails validation layers eval suites review gates approval flows and recovery paths that keep autonomous output at production quality.
• Build human-in-the-loop systems that preserve human judgment where it matters without turning every workflow into manual review.
• Drive reliability and observability as a first-class product surface. If the system misbehaves you should know before anyone else does.
• Ship against outcomes that matter: cost per asset quality and rework rate throughput review speed placement speed escaped-defect rate uptime and production trust.
• Translate ambiguous creative operational and engineering goals into clear specifications scoped plans and shipped systems.
• Partner directly with creative AI engineering product design art live operations QA and leadership to find the highest-leverage problems and solve them.
• Make our codebases tools documentation and workflows more legible to both humans and agents.
• Set the engineering bar for agentic development at BVG through architecture review standards documentation patterns and mentorship.
• Use AI coding agents as a core part of your daily workflow directing them reviewing their output and building infrastructure that makes them more useful for everyone.
• Help define a practical AI-first engineering culture focused on speed quality reliability and measurable business impact.

• Substantial experience shipping and operating production software at scale.
• Strong full stack engineering depth ideally with TypeScript React SQL Postgres APIs backend services queues workers and production web applications.
• Experience owning products platforms or systems end to end not just one layer of someone elses stack.
• Real experience building agentic systems autonomous workflows AI-enabled products or production AI infrastructure.
• Daily fluent use of AI coding agents such as Claude Code Cursor Codex or similar tools as part of how you work.
• Strong first-principles engineering judgment. You can defend your architecture choices without hiding behind a framework.
• Experience with orchestration tool use task planning state management context management retrieval workflow reliability and human review systems.
• Experience building or operating evals traces guardrails test harnesses quality checks or other systems that make AI output measurable and trustworthy.
• Comfort with nondeterministic systems ambiguous requirements and failures that require deep investigation across unfamiliar stacks.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to identify when generated output is wrong incomplete fragile off-brand unsafe or subtly low quality.
• A high bar for reliability maintainability observability documentation and developer experience.
• Disciplined git pull request code review testing deployment and production operations practices whether the author is human or agent.
• Ability to mentor other engineers set patterns and raise the technical bar around you.
• High agency high urgency and a builders mindset. You move fast without confusing speed with sloppiness.

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.
• Understanding of model behavior including context windows retrieval failure modes grounding gaps hallucination patterns calibration prompt design and spec design.
• Experience with structured generation tool calls function calling schema-constrained output approval workflows and automated review.
• Experience with eval suites regression tests quality measurement observability and production monitoring for AI systems.
• Clear judgment about where AI can automate work where human review is required and where quality cannot be compromised.
• Systems that run when you are away from the keyboard and the instrumentation to trust them.
• Evidence that other peoples output improved because of infrastructure tools workflows or platforms you built.

When you interview with us expect to show real systems not just talk about AI.

• Experience shipping generative AI or agentic AI features in customer-facing or business-critical production environments.
• Experience with MCP OpenAI Anthropic Gemini Vercel AI SDK LangGraph LlamaIndex LangChain or similar AI development ecosystems.
• Experience with tool orchestration agent memory multi-model routing background workers queues event-driven systems workflow engines or durable execution.
• Experience building internal tools for creative production game operations content pipelines asset generation QA automation or media workflows.
• Experience with art animation asset pipelines Flash Animate or creative tooling.
• Strong visual judgment and the ability to push generated content toward better quality consistency and production value.
• Experience in gaming live-service products virtual worlds social games free-to-play games high-DAU consumer products or other production environments where reliability and quality matter every day.
• Experience with observability tools distributed-systems reliability incident response cost telemetry or production platform operations.
• Zero-to-one founding-engineer or early-stage platform-building experience.

The ideal candidate is a principal-level builder who wants the ground floor of something consequential.

They are not using AI simply to write code faster. They are architecting the systems that AI runs inside: orchestration tools memory evals review loops observability calibration recovery and human control surfaces.

They can think through the product experience the data model the workflow the orchestration pattern the interface the failure modes the quality controls and the production risks then go build the system.

They are comfortable with ambiguity but they do not leave ambiguity unmanaged. They turn unclear goals into executable specs. They turn experiments into platforms. They turn repeated manual effort into automated workflows. They turn AI demos into production infrastructure.

They have a high bar a practical bias and something to prove.

This role is best suited for someone who wants founding-level ownership of a meaningful AI platform inside a profitable live-service gaming company and who is excited to help define how game content engineering workflows and autonomous systems are built for the next decade.

The expected base salary range for this role is CAD $175000 to $200000 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.

Candidates who can show exceptional agentic systems work including production architecture evaluation infrastructure systems running unattended and meaningful leverage created for other teams will be considered at the higher end of the range.

• Group Retirement Savings Plan matching and participation.
• Comprehensive benefits package including health dental and vision coverage.
• Health and Wellness spending account.
• 15 vacation days.
• 10 wellness days.
• A founding-level seat on the systems that will define how an AI-first game studio operates.
• Exposure to live-service games content production game operations internal platform development and autonomous engineering workflows.
• A high-ownership role with meaningful influence over how AI is adopted across the company.
• A leadership team that is all-in on practical AI adoption not performative AI theatre.

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.

If you require accommodation during the hiring process please contact so we can work with you to support your needs.

When you apply tell us about an agentic system you have built or shipped. We are especially interested in what it did how it failed how you measured it how you made it more reliable and what changed because it existed.

Required Experience:

Staff IC