Engineering Manager & Product Lead, Float Intelligence

Job description

This posting reflects a current, actively recruited opening at Float. All applications are being reviewed on a rolling basis. ABOUT FLOAT Float is on a mission to simplify finance for Canadian businesses, empowering them to eliminate complexity and unlock new opportunities. Through our innovative platform, Float enables businesses to streamline financial operations and optimize cash flow, so they can focus on what matters most: growth. As one of Canada’s fastest growing companies https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/rob-magazine/top-growing-companies/article-ranking-canadas-top-growing-companies-of-2024/ and top-rated startups in 2025 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/floatfinancial_were-proud-to-share-that-float-has-been-activity-7387093684720300032-2DDz/, 2024 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-top-startups-2024-15-canadian-companies-rise-linkedin-news-llihe/ and 2023 https://lnkd.in/TSU23CA, Float is customer-obsessed, passionate and entrepreneurial, with a team that includes leaders from Uber, Stripe, Shopify, Top Hat, Ada, Doordash, Snowflake, and Wealthsimple. At Float, everyone is an owner, bringing their unique perspective to our team and product. Your voice is important, and we take having a culture based on feedback seriously. We openly share our thoughts and differing opinions so we can continue to improve. We do our best to keep our decision-making decentralized so that all team members feel ownership in our success. OUR PRODUCT Float is Canada’s intelligent financial operating system, combining modern financial services and software to help businesses spend, save, and grow. Trusted by more than 10,000 Canadian companies, Float provides high-limit corporate cards, automated expense management, next-day bill payments, high-yield accounts, and industry-leading support, all built in Canada, for Canada. Float recently announced our $85 million Series C https://floatfinancial.com/press/float-financial-raises-cad-85-million-series-c, and is backed by world-class investors, including Inovia Capital, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, OMERS Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank. Our team is a collection of ambitious, collaborative and mission-driven people from all walks of life but with one goal: helping Canadian companies not just survive but thrive. And we’re looking for bold innovators to help shape the future of business finance in Canada. AI USE IN OUR HIRING PROCESS We use technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), to support parts of our hiring process. This may include AI-assisted scheduling and candidate communications, and AI-generated interview notes, guides or summaries to help our team focus on the conversation. All hiring decisions are made by our hiring team. ABOUT THE ROLE Float is hiring a Founding Lead to own and accelerate Float Intelligence end to end, across the technical foundations, the data, and the product experiences, all under a single mandate. Float Intelligence is how we bring agentic AI finance to every business in Canada: a product that does the finance work our customers do by hand today, coding transactions, chasing receipts, checking spend against policy, and gathering invoices out of inboxes and vendor portals. We shipped the first version this year and it worked. Now we are building the rest of it, and we are building it fast. You would lead a small, fast-moving team of product engineers and data/ML engineers, reporting directly to the Head of Product. This is intentionally a hybrid seat across Engineering and Product leadership. You own the roadmap for what gets built, and you make the technical calls: model choice, evaluation, what has to be deterministic, and what a launch is gated on. The team ships into other product teams' surfaces and builds net-new surfaces that put AI directly in front of customers. This is a true end-to-end owner role. The people who do best here are ex-founders and highly capable technical leaders with strong commercial product taste, opinionated about both what to build and how to build it, and drawn to the highest-leverage, most cutting-edge AI work across Float's entire product surface. WHAT YOU'LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR - Leading, growing, and developing a small team of product engineers and data/ML engineers. - Owning the roadmap for Float's AI experiences alongside the Head of Product, including proposing new bets. - Taking AI products from zero to one, from exploratory proofs of concept through to the experiences that reach customers at scale. - Making the technical calls: model and LLM approach, evaluation design, and the infrastructure for scale, latency, and inference cost. - Building the shared platform layer, where required for: extraction, evaluation, observability, agent and prompt frameworks, and data pipelines, that other product teams build on rather than rebuild. - Equipping internal product teams with the AI models and engines they need to ship the experiences they want, and building new customer-facing surfaces that expose those experiences directly. - Partnering with the product managers whose areas these experiences ship into, so each one lands well and ownership is clear afterward. - Deciding what to stop, since exploratory work only pays off when the things that are not working get killed quickly. ABOUT YOU HERE'S WHAT SETS YOU UP FOR SUCCESS AT FLOAT: - You Put Customers First, Always. You care deeply about delivering meaningful value. Whether you're building internal systems or customer-facing features, you're always thinking about how to make life better for our users. - You Act Like an Owner. You take responsibility for outcomes, step up to challenges, and seek solutions proactively—doing what's best for the business, not just your role. - You Think Big and Move Fast. You're energized by building from 0 to 1. You're not afraid to challenge the status quo, experiment quickly, and learn as you go. - You Constantly Learn and Grow. You're hungry to improve your craft and open to feedback. You bring a growth mindset to everything you do. - You Raise the Bar. You care about doing things well and efficiently. You balance speed with rigor and always look for ways to improve how we work. - You Win as a Team. You're a generous collaborator who values communication, context, and shared wins. You lift others up and help make the team stronger. IN ADDITION TO LIVING OUR VALUES, YOU BRING: - 7+ years in software engineering, including time at a company with a strong engineering culture where you reached a senior or staff level. - 2+ years managing engineers, ideally including people whose specialty is not your own. - Hands-on experience building and shipping AI or LLM-backed products to real users — not prototypes or internal experiments. - Past experience building 0→1 products or founding a software business. - Real depth in the parts that make AI products work in production: evaluation design, infrastructure at scale, latency, and managing inference cost with vendors. - A track record of building something 0→1, whether as a founder, an early engineer, or the person who started a product line inside a larger company. - Product instincts strong enough to own a roadmap: choosing what to build, sequencing it, and defending what you left out. - Comfort working across other teams' surfaces and getting alignment without formal authority. - Nice to have: experience fine-tuning models, or a data science or ML engineering background. THIS MAY NOT BE THE ROLE FOR YOU IF: - You want a defined roadmap handed to you. Direction will come from the Head of Product for the first initiatives, but a lead who never brings their own ideas forward is not what this seat needs. - Your AI experience is prototypes and demos rather than something that carried production traffic and real consequences when it was wrong. - You have only worked inside a mature platform with dedicated data, infrastructure and SRE teams underneath you. - You are a product leader who does not want to make technical decisions, or an engineer who does not want to own product outcomes. This role is both. - You have not managed people, or you would rather not. - You prefer certainty. A meaningful share of this work will be exploratory, and some of it will be killed. OUR HIRING PHILOSOPHY We hire for character, curiosity, and learning velocity before credentials. Titles matter less than impact, and every hire is expected to raise the bar for Float as a whole. WHY YOU SHOULD JOIN - Work at one of Canada's fastest-growing fintech companies - Make a real impact in a high-autonomy, high-growth role - Collaborate with an ambitious and supportive team - Competitive compensation, equity options, and benefits - Hybrid work model – we are based in Toronto with in-office days for connection and collaboration - Enjoy catered team lunches every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - Bring your pup to our dog-friendly office - Thrive in a high-trust, high-performance culture where your work truly matters IN SHORT At Float, you’ll thrive if you’re bold, curious, and eager to make a real impact. We're building something special—and having a lot of fun along the way. If you’re excited to build, grow, and win together, we’d love to meet you. We’re committed to building a workplace that’s welcoming and accessible for everyone. If you need any accommodations during the hiring process or once you join Float, just let us know! You can reach out to Vic https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoria-boult-b21b2053/ (victoria@floatfinancial.com), and we’ll work with you to make sure you have what you need to succeed.