AI Product Engineer

About Fluent Software Group

Fluent Software Group is part of Valsoft Corporation’s family of operating groups—a global leader in acquiring and growing vertical market software companies. We focus on specialized industries where deep expertise truly makes the difference.

At Fluent, we give founders and their teams a forever home—preserving their culture and momentum while unlocking new resources, technology, and proven operational playbooks that fuel sustainable, long-term growth.

The Mission

We’re building AI startups inside an established portfolio of vertical software companies—and we need engineers who can make ideas real, fast.

Our mandate is to partner with Fluent’s existing businesses to create new AI-powered products and sell them into their verticalized customer bases—and once proven, expand beyond them. The starting point could be either: agentifying an existing workflow that the business software already helps facilitate today, or building a net-new product altogether. The through-line is simple—we’re creating customer value in one of two forms: helping them operate more efficiently, or helping them capture revenue opportunities they’re currently missing.

This is startup building with a cheat code: you get established customer relationships, industry expertise, existing infrastructure, and revenue to validate against—without starting from zero.

The Opportunity

You’ll work alongside an AI Ventures Lead who owns customer discovery, product strategy, and the roadmap. Your job is to be the person who makes their ideas tangible—taking a validated concept or rough direction and turning it into a working, demoable prototype in days.

This is a hands-on engineering role with real product influence. You’re not just writing code to spec—you’ll shape how things get built, push back when an approach won’t work, suggest better solutions, and make technical decisions on the fly. You’ll integrate AI APIs, build agentic workflows, stand up full-stack prototypes, and partner with portfolio company R&D teams to move the best work into production.

This role is designed for someone who wants to grow into a technical leadership position. Build well, ship fast, and the scope expands with you.

Note: We do have offices in Montreal and Toronto. The role could require working at the office should you be located there. Otherwise, it is remote.

The Mindset We’re Hiring For

Skills can be learned. Mindset can’t. These are the traits that will make you successful here:

• Builder Instinct: You’d rather build than plan. When someone describes a problem, your brain immediately starts architecting the solution. You’re the person who has a working version before the meeting ends.
• Speed Over Perfection: You understand that a prototype that lands in front of a customer on Wednesday is worth more than a polished product next quarter. You ship, you learn, you iterate.
• Self-Directed: You don’t need detailed tickets to be productive. Give you a direction and you’ll figure out the rest—choosing the right tools, making tradeoffs, and unblocking yourself without waiting for someone to tell you how.
• Technically Curious: You’re the first to know when a new model drops, a framework ships a breaking change, or a tool emerges that changes the game. You stay on the frontier because you can’t help it.
• Collaborative: You’ll work closely with your Ventures Lead and with R&D teams at each portfolio company. You communicate clearly, ask good questions, earn trust from engineers who know their product deeply, and raise your hand early when something isn’t working.
• Hungry: You want to build something that matters and grow your career fast. You see this as a launchpad—not a landing pad.

What You’ll Do

• Rapidly prototype AI-powered products and features: take a concept from your Ventures Lead and deliver a working, demoable solution in 2–3 days.
• Build end-to-end: frontend, backend, API integrations, and database—whatever it takes to get a prototype in front of a customer.
• Integrate AI model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure) and build agentic workflows using function calling, tool use, and orchestration frameworks.
• Build RAG pipelines that ground AI in domain-specific customer data using vector databases and embedding models.
• Partner with portfolio company R&D teams to take validated prototypes into production—translating your fast-build into their architecture, standards, and infrastructure.
• Participate in customer demos and POCs alongside your Ventures Lead, providing technical depth and fielding implementation questions.

Technical Skills

You’re a full-stack generalist who can wire together an entire working product solo. We don’t need depth in every layer—we need someone who can go end-to-end, fast.

Full-Stack Fundamentals

• Comfortable building end-to-end: modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue.js, TypeScript), server-side development (Node.js, Python, or C#/.NET), REST/GraphQL APIs, and relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL). You don’t need to be an expert in every layer, but you need to be able to stand up a working, demoable product without waiting on another team.

AI & Agentic Development

• Hands-on experience integrating AI model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure Cognitive Services) into real products—not just toy projects.
• Experience building agentic workflows: multi-step AI agents using function calling, tool use, and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel).
• Strong RAG skills: building pipelines that ground AI in domain-specific customer data using vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate) and embedding models.
• Fluency in prompt engineering, token/cost management, and latency tradeoffs in production AI features.

Tools & Velocity

• Proficiency with AI-enhanced development tools (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, bolt.new, v0, Replit)—and the instinct to adopt whatever’s next.
• Git, CI/CD, and agile workflows. You ship, you iterate, you don’t over-process.

Qualifications

• 1–4 years of professional experience in software engineering, applied AI, or product development—but what you’ve built matters more than tenure.
• Demonstrated ability to take an idea from concept to working prototype independently.
• Deep fluency in the AI tooling ecosystem—and the habit of staying current. You know about new releases before anyone asks you to look.
• Clear communicator who can explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders and collaborate effectively with engineers across teams.
• A track record of self-directed work: side projects, open-source contributions, hackathon wins, or entrepreneurial ventures carry significant weight.
• Bonus: experience in SaaS, vertical market software, or early-stage startup environments.

What This Role Is Not

This is not a role where you’ll pick up fully scoped tickets from a backlog. There’s no established playbook and the requirements will often be ambiguous. You won’t be heads-down on a single product for months—you’ll move between ideas quickly as the team validates and iterates. If you need heavy structure or prefer deep specialization over breadth and speed, this isn’t the right fit. If that excites you—keep reading.

Why Fluent

• Growth-track role: Prove yourself as an engineer and grow into technical leadership as the products and team scale.
• Skin in the game: Compensation includes meaningful participation in the product’s success—because we want you building like an owner, not an employee.
• Built-in distribution: You’re not building for hypothetical users. Fluent’s portfolio gives you real customers, real data, and real feedback from day one.
• Direct impact: Your prototypes will be in front of customers within days, not buried in a roadmap.
• Autonomy with support: You’ll have a Ventures Lead to set direction and clear obstacles, but how you build is up to you.
• AI-first culture: We’re building a center of excellence around AI integration and are committed to responsible, value-driven adoption.

If you’d rather build the demo than sit through the meeting about it—we want to talk to you.

Key skills/competency

• AI Development
• Full-Stack Development
• Rapid Prototyping
• Agentic Workflows
• RAG Pipelines
• API Integration
• Product Strategy
• Technical Leadership
• Agile Methodologies
• Startup Environment