---
title: 'Senior Engineering Manager at FirstPrinciples'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-engineering-manager-firstprinciples-ontario-erk9crg6085t'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Senior Engineering Manager at FirstPrinciples

- **Company:** FirstPrinciples
- **Location:** Ontario, Canada
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-07-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/firstprinciples/f4e43139-1340-4850-9837-2d3210d77444

## Job description

## ABOUT FIRSTPRINCIPLES

FirstPrinciples is building AI to accelerate scientific discovery. Our core product is the Theo Platform, a research environment built to help researchers iterate faster, validate rigorously, and reach verified results they can trust.

We're a fast-growing, remote-first team of builders, researchers, engineers, and thinkers working across Canada, the US, the UK, and expanding globally. What brings us together is a shared curiosity about how the universe works, and a belief that we can build systems that help us explore it more effectively.

We spend our time working on questions that don't have clear answers, like how to design AI that can reason through scientific problems, and how the scientific process as a whole might evolve. This is work that sits somewhere between creativity and rigorous thinking, and often requires comfort with ambiguity and iteration. If you're someone who enjoys tackling big, abstract problems and exploring ideas that don't yet have a defined path forward, you'll likely find the work here interesting.

## THE ROLE:

We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a team of four to six engineers building core capabilities for Theo and our scientific research platform.

You will develop exceptional engineers, set technical direction, and turn ambitious research ideas into reliable systems. You will operate in a matrixed organization, bringing together specialists from engineering, AI research, physics, simulation, infrastructure, and product into multidisciplinary squads.

A central part of the role is creating a tight feedback loop between research and engineering. You will help researchers and engineers shape solutions together, evolve promising prototypes collaboratively, and preserve scientific insight as experimental systems become robust, scalable products.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone comfortable moving between people development, architecture, execution, and frontier research.

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Manage, coach, and develop a team of four to six engineers.
- Form and lead multidisciplinary squads around clear scientific and product outcomes.
- Translate open-ended research goals into technical strategies, milestones, and well-designed systems.
- Partner closely with researchers and physicists from early exploration through implementation and production.
- Create effective paths for researchers to contribute prototypes, algorithms, evaluations, and domain-specific code alongside engineers.
- Help experimental systems mature without losing the ideas and assumptions that made them scientifically valuable.
- Guide architecture, interfaces, technical standards, and major implementation decisions.
- Establish clear ownership and decision-making across teams and reporting lines.
- Balance research velocity with reliability, maintainability, reproducibility, security, and cost.
- Build strong practices for testing, evaluation, observability, documentation, deployment, and operational ownership.
- Stay close enough to the work to review designs, diagnose difficult problems, and contribute directly when it has high leverage.
- Influence engineering strategy, hiring, organizational design, and technical culture beyond your immediate team.

## WHO YOU ARE:

- Significant software engineering experience building complex systems.
- Experience managing and developing high-performing engineers, with a demonstrated ability to raise the velocity and accountability of engineering teams in a sustainable fashion.
- A bias for action and iterative delivery, while maintaining high technical standards.
- Strong technical judgement across architecture, implementation, and production operations.
- Strong execution judgement of knowing when to explore, when to decide, when to simplify, and when to push a team toward completion.
- Experience leading cross-functional or matrixed teams without relying on direct authority.
- A record of turning ambiguous ideas or prototypes into dependable capabilities.
- The ability to build trust and shared language across engineering and research disciplines.
- Scientific curiosity and the technical humility to learn from deep domain experts.
- Strong communication, facilitation, and conflict-resolution skills.
- A pragmatic, low-ego leadership style grounded in evidence and clear reasoning.
- Comfort operating where the problem, solution, and path to delivery may all be uncertain.

## PARTICULARLY RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

- AI, machine learning, agentic systems, simulation, scientific computing, or research infrastructure.
- Model engineering, applications, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, or developer platforms.
- Moving research prototypes into scalable, maintainable products.
- Designing systems where evaluation, provenance, reproducibility, or scientific validity matter.
- Working with physicists, mathematicians, or other research-intensive teams.
- Leading remote and globally distributed teams.

## WHY FIRSTPRINCIPLES

You will help define how engineers, AI researchers, and physicists work together to build a new kind of scientific instrument—one capable of contributing to humanity’s understanding of the universe.

Please submit a resume and cover letter describing your leadership experience, technical background, and interest in our mission. Include “Senior Engineering Manager” in your cover letter.

## About FirstPrinciples

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: FirstPrinciples is a non-profit, AI-first research organization building an autonomous AI Physicist to accelerate fundamental physics discovery and advance humanity’s understanding of nature.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Non-profit) – funded by philanthropic grants (e.g., John Templeton Foundation)
- **Headquarters**: Toronto, Canada
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Ildar Shar

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Research Services / AI / Fundamental Physics
- **Target customers**: The scientific community and research institutions (B2 science); operates as a mission-driven open-science platform, not a commercial vendor.
- **Mission**: To unlock the transformative potential of fundamental science by building an open, autonomous research engine (the AI Physicist) that can generate and test novel theoretical frameworks – with a goal of unifying quantum field theory and general relativity by 2035.

## Products & Services
- **Theo (AI Physicist)**: An open-source, autonomous research engine that combines AI, symbolic reasoning, and self-directed research capabilities to explore theoretical physics and produce novel insights.
- **FirstPrinciples Fellowship Program**: A fixed-term, fully remote program for PhD/postdoctoral researchers in ML and physics to build core modules of the AI Physicist and help establish open scientific infrastructure.
- **Theo Collaborators Program**: A selective research collaboration that brings expert physicists into direct engagement with Theo to evaluate and improve its scientific reasoning.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Funding**: Not applicable (non‑profit). Received a philanthropic grant from the **John Templeton Foundation** – early institutional support for the AI Physicist.
- **Key Metric**: 27 employees (as of mid‑2026), with **140% year‑over-year headcount growth**; 7,042 LinkedIn followers.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: John Templeton Foundation; Scientific Advisory Board includes **Victor Galitski** (inaugural member) and **Yang-Hui He** (mathematical physicist).
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid team expansion (140% YoY), launch of Fellowship Program (January 2026), fully remote global operations with presence in Canada, US, and Belgium.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Mission‑driven, non‑profit, open‑source** model attracts top AI and physics talent who want impact over profit.
- **Long‑term vision** (2035 breakthrough) combined with startup‑like speed and iteration.
- **Unique interdisciplinary approach** – merges cutting‑edge AI with rigorous theoretical physics, guided by a world‑class Scientific Advisory Board.
- **Autonomous research loops** that go beyond data analysis to actively generate and test new scientific ideas.

## Strategic Focus
- Building and scaling the AI Physicist to achieve a breakthrough in fundamental physics (unification of QFT & GR).
- Expanding the research community through fellowships and collaborative programs (Theo Collaborators).
- Developing open scientific infrastructure and establishing new standards for AI‑driven discovery.
- Deepening collaborations with leading physicists and institutions.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote‑first culture** – a global collective where engineers, physicists, and AI researchers collaborate asynchronously.
- **Startup energy with non‑profit purpose** – fast iteration, low hierarchy, and direct impact on science.
- **Flexible work** – primarily remote; some hybrid options in Toronto.
- **Notable perks** (from careers page): fully remote positions available, entrepreneurial environment, and the chance to work on one of the most ambitious AI‑science projects today.
- **Roles available** (as of mid‑2026): MTS in DevOps/Infrastructure, Engineering, Research; Staff Physicist (Quantum Information); Training Engineer (Large Scale Foundation Models); Human‑AI Interaction Designer; Strategic Partnerships Manager; etc.

## Sources
1. [greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/firstprinciples)
2. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/firstprinciples-foundation)
3. [linkedin.com](https://ca.linkedin.com/company/firstprinciplesfoundation)
4. [firstprinciples.org – Press](https://www.firstprinciples.org/press)
5. [firstprinciples.org – Fellowship announcement](https://www.firstprinciples.org/article/firstprinciples-launches-fellowship-program-for-researchers-in-ai-and-physics)

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