{"id":139278,"url":"https://alion.io/job/big-viking-games-principal-engineer-agentic-products-workflows","title":"Principal Engineer, Agentic Products & Workflows","company":{"id":6597,"name":"Big Viking Games","domain":"bigvikinggames.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/big-viking-games","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Toronto, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":90000,"max_usd":178000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":28},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Hallucination","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Next.js","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"Self-Healing","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":true},{"name":"LlamaIndex","optional":true},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true},{"name":"Vercel AI SDK","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-11T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-11","last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T18:20:49Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":79,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":79},"description":"Principal Engineer, Agentic Products & Workflows\nToronto, ON\nHybrid, 4 days per week in office\nFull-time\nDepartment: Engineering\nReports to: Engineering and Studio Leadership\nAbout Big Viking Games\nBig Viking Games exists to make fans.\nWe 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.\nWe are now rebuilding the company as an AI-first studio. That is not a slogan here. It is an operating standard.\nAI 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.\nAbout the Role\nBig Viking Games is hiring a Principal Engineer, Agentic Products & Workflows to build the systems that make an AI-first game studio real.\nThis 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.\nThis is not a role for someone who is simply curious about AI.\nYou 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.\nYou 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.\nThis 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.\nIf that problem excites you, this role is built for you.\nWhat You’ll Build\nYou will build and own systems across two flagship workstreams.\nAutonomous Engineering Platform\nThe internal platform that lets a small number of engineers safely direct a large amount of autonomous work.\nThis includes:\nOrchestration primitives for multi-agent, multi-model workflows, including routing, scheduling, state management, memory, task decomposition, and recovery.\nAutonomous engineering workflows that can take a scoped ticket toward a reviewed, tested pull request.\nAI-to-AI review layers where agents critique, test, validate, and gate each other’s output before a human needs to intervene.\nSelf-healing workflows with retries, escalation paths, rollback, recovery, and failure classification.\nCross-agent memory and calibration systems so knowledge compounds instead of disappearing between runs.\nPrediction and confidence systems that help agents know when to proceed, when to ask, and when to stop.\nEvaluation infrastructure, test harnesses, traces, metrics, and dashboards that catch hallucinations, regressions, grounding gaps, quality drift, and cost spikes before they reach production.\nIntegration layers that connect agents safely to codebases, tickets, repositories, data sources, tools, documentation, and production workflows.\nLiveOps Content Pipelines\nThe AI-enabled production systems that turn creative direction into production-ready game content at scale.\nThis includes:\nContent generation workflows that produce structured, reviewable output aligned to YoWorld, FishWorld, and our quality standards.\nHuman review surfaces where designers, artists, product managers, and live operations teams can steer, approve, reject, revise, and improve generated content.\nPrompt and spec composition systems that make quality repeatable rather than dependent on individual heroics.\nAudit, retry, versioning, and approval infrastructure so every input, output, revision, decision, and release step is tracked and recoverable.\nTooling that helps creative and production teams move faster without lowering the bar.\nIntegration layers that move approved content safely into live game workflows.\nYou will own the quality of what these systems produce, not just the plumbing that moves data around.\nWhat You’ll Do\nArchitect, build, test, and operate agentic systems that support AI-enabled game production, autonomous engineering, content workflows, and internal tools.\nOwn the agentic platform end to end, including orchestration primitives, workflow design, review loops, memory, evaluation, observability, and integration into live-game systems.\nChoose and defend the right orchestration pattern for each problem, including sequential, parallel, swarm, planner-executor, tool-using, and human-in-the-loop patterns.\nBuild 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.\nDesign guardrails, validation layers, eval suites, review gates, approval flows, and recovery paths that keep autonomous output at production quality.\nBuild human-in-the-loop systems that preserve human judgment where it matters without turning every workflow into manual review.\nDrive reliability and observability as a first-class product surface. If the system misbehaves, you should know before anyone else does.\nShip against outcomes that matter: cost per asset, quality and rework rate, throughput, review speed, placement speed, escaped-defect rate, uptime, and production trust.\nTranslate ambiguous creative, operational, and engineering goals into clear specifications, scoped plans, and shipped systems.\nPartner directly with creative AI, engineering, product, design, art, live operations, QA, and leadership to find the highest-leverage problems and solve them.\nMake our codebases, tools, documentation, and workflows more legible to both humans and agents.\nSet the engineering bar for agentic development at BVG through architecture, review standards, documentation, patterns, and mentorship.\nUse 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.\nHelp define a practical AI-first engineering culture focused on speed, quality, reliability, and measurable business impact.\nRequirements\nWhat You Bring\nSubstantial experience shipping and operating production software at scale.\nStrong full stack engineering depth, ideally with TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, SQL, Postgres, APIs, backend services, queues, workers, and production web applications.\nExperience owning products, platforms, or systems end to end, not just one layer of someone else’s stack.\nReal experience building agentic systems, autonomous workflows, AI-enabled products, or production AI infrastructure.\nDaily, fluent use of AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar tools as part of how you work.\nStrong first-principles engineering judgment. You can defend your architecture choices without hiding behind a framework.\nExperience with orchestration, tool use, task planning, state management, context management, retrieval, workflow reliability, and human review systems.\nExperience building or operating evals, traces, guardrails, test harnesses, quality checks, or other systems that make AI output measurable and trustworthy.\nComfort with nondeterministic systems, ambiguous requirements, and failures that require deep investigation across unfamiliar stacks.\nStrong product judgment and the ability to identify when generated output is wrong, incomplete, fragile, off-brand, unsafe, or subtly low quality.\nA high bar for reliability, maintainability, observability, documentation, and developer experience.\nDisciplined git, pull request, code review, testing, deployment, and production operations practices, whether the author is human or agent.\nAbility to mentor other engineers, set patterns, and raise the technical bar around you.\nHigh agency, high urgency, and a builder’s mindset. You move fast without confusing speed with sloppiness.\nAI and Agentic Systems Experience\nThis is the heart of the role, and the bar is deliberately high.\nYou should be able to demonstrate:\nAgentic systems you have designed, built, shipped, or operated.\nPractical fluency with AI coding agents and multi-agent workflows.\nUnderstanding of model behavior, including context windows, retrieval failure modes, grounding gaps, hallucination patterns, calibration, prompt design, and spec design.\nExperience with structured generation, tool calls, function calling, schema-constrained output, approval workflows, and automated review.\nExperience with eval suites, regression tests, quality measurement, observability, and production monitoring for AI systems.\nClear judgment about where AI can automate work, where human review is required, and where quality cannot be compromised.\nSystems that run when you are away from the keyboard and the instrumentation to trust them.\nEvidence that other people’s output improved because of infrastructure, tools, workflows, or platforms you built.\nWhen you interview with us, expect to show real systems, not just talk about AI.\nNice to Have\nExperience shipping generative AI or agentic AI features in customer-facing or business-critical production environments.\nExperience with MCP, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Vercel AI SDK, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, LangChain, or similar AI development ecosystems.\nExperience with tool orchestration, agent memory, multi-model routing, background workers, queues, event-driven systems, workflow engines, or durable execution.\nExperience building internal tools for creative production, game operations, content pipelines, asset generation, QA automation, or media workflows.\nExperience with art, animation, asset pipelines, Flash, Animate, or creative tooling.\nStrong visual judgment and the ability to push generated content toward better quality, consistency, and production value.\nExperience 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.\nExperience with observability tools, distributed-systems reliability, incident response, cost telemetry, or production platform operations.\nZero-to-one, founding-engineer, or early-stage platform-building experience.\nIdeal Candidate Profile\nThe ideal candidate is a principal-level builder who wants the ground floor of something consequential.\nThey 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.\nThey 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.\nThey 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.\nThey have a high bar, a practical bias, and something to prove.\nThis...","description_format":"text","description_chars":14072,"description_truncated":true,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Retirement plans"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Mobile Games","Game Development","Metaverse"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-11T00:00:00Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":24,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.662,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":79,"expected_fill_days":47,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-29T05:49:05Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/big-viking-games-principal-engineer-agentic-products-workflows","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/big-viking-games-principal-engineer-agentic-products-workflows.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-29T22:07:46Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":32677,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-30T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":6597},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6597"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fbig-viking-games-principal-engineer-agentic-products-workflows"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fbig-viking-games-principal-engineer-agentic-products-workflows"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fbig-viking-games-principal-engineer-agentic-products-workflows"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/big-viking-games-principal-engineer-agentic-products-workflows\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fbig-viking-games-principal-engineer-agentic-products-workflows"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":139278}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"bigvikinggames.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":139278},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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