--- title: 'Staff / Principal AI Developer at Cadstrom' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-principal-ai-developer-cadstrom-montreal-or-in-hh01zxa6c4xa' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-12' --- # Staff / Principal AI Developer at Cadstrom - **Company:** Cadstrom - **Location:** Montreal OR in, Canada - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-05-31 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12 - **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/cadstrom-io/am9icG9zdDoqofWUgYW_JlRqi9ziWJ9d ## Job description Staff / Principal AI Developer Montreal, Canada, Hybrid About the Role: We are hiring a Staff or Principal level AI Developer who is passionate about electronics. You will play an early and foundational role leading the technical direction and implementation of product AI systems at Cadstrom. You will define the core AI platform supporting a wide range of use cases  – with your decisions grounded in evidence from rigorous experimentation. You will own the experimentation and evaluation framework that lets us improve faster than anyone else in the space, and will partner directly with the founders and product owners to translate AI capability into customer outcomes. We move fast – the product is shipping, customers are live, and every week matters. This is a high-ownership role for a detail-obsessed AI developer who treats Cadstrom's outcome as their own. Your judgment will help shape the AI moat that distinguishes Cadstrom from every other tool in the EDA industry. You'll be measured not just on what you build, but on how much more effective the team and the product become because you're here. What are we doing? We are accelerating the world's hardware ingenuity by blending generative AI, ML, and novel deterministic approaches to electronics simulation and validation. We're providing our enthusiastic customers intelligent and automated access to the most advanced validation tools for catching design errors before they reach fab – helping engineers of all levels deliver their designs faster, cheaper, and with less waste. Who are we? We are a small team of innovators who are passionate about fundamentally improving how electrical engineers deliver electronics with higher confidence. We are backed by Bison Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and the Allen Institute for AI's Incubator. Our distinguished founders are responsible for creating the largest product development firm in the US, and building Azure Quantum (and more!) at Microsoft. We know you'll be in good company. Key Responsibilities: - Build and own the experimentation and evaluation tooling that electrical engineering domain experts use to analyze, calibrate, and improve our AI systems. Define what "good" looks like and what evidence is required to move forward. - Design and ship self-improving systems exposed to our customers – closing the loop between production signal, evaluation, and pipeline improvements. - Design and own the tool/action surfaces our AI agents reason over (MCP-based or otherwise) – the contracts, error handling, guardrails, and observability that make multi-step agents reliable in the wild. - Dive deep into the data to diagnose and fix the root causes of performance issues based on model traces, outputs, replay, and experiments. - Partner closely with electrical engineers to internalize domain conventions and translate that understanding into better prompts, schemas, and evaluations. - Contribute broadly to AI across the product. Beyond your primary focus area, you'll also help advance our pipelines for data extraction from electrical component datasheets and other AI surfaces of the product. - Raise the bar across the team. Mentor AI engineers, set strong code and review standards, and have a say in hiring as we continue to grow. Required Qualifications: - 6+ years building AI/ML systems, with multiple production launches you led the technical direction for. You've owned outcomes, not just tickets. - Deep practical experience with LLMs (prompt engineering, RAG, eval design), including the realities of getting stochastic systems to behave reliably in production. - Track record of building from a small initial dataset to a robust, calibrated, continuously improving system. You know how to design ground truth, run principled experiments, and avoid deceiving yourself with the wrong metric. - Architectural judgment: you can weigh tradeoffs across cost, latency, accuracy, maintainability, and time-to-impact, and share your reasoning with peers, juniors, and executives. - Demonstrated multiplier effect on the teams you've been part of – through mentorship, tooling, standards, or how you bring domain experts into the loop. - TypeScript proficiency, with strong instincts around type safety, packaging, services, and testing. - Meticulous attention to detail in debugging and root-cause analysis. - Excellent written and visual communication; you adapt to your audience, from engineers to executives. - Undergrad in CS/Engineering/STEM; relevant graduate degree or equivalent experience is a plus. Preferred Qualifications: - Shipped agentic systems in production - not just prototypes. You can speak with conviction about what makes them materially harder than linear pipelines. - Experience building and optimizing tools (MCP-based or otherwise) for use by AI agents. - Electronics fundamentals (e.g. interpreting a datasheet) via coursework or hobbyist experience. - Retrieval (vector DBs), chunking/embedding strategies, and context budgeting. - LLM-ops platforms (e.g. LangSmith, LangGraph, DSPy). - Data pipelines in a cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure). - Startup experience, or a research-based Master's in a STEM field. - Based in Montreal or the GTA Personal Qualities: - Detail-obsessed. You notice what others miss – in model outputs, in datasheets, in code – and you chase it down. - Bias to action with high ownership. You don't wait for perfect information; you make calls with what you have and adjust, treating Cadstrom's outcome as your own. - Disciplined experimenter. You hold hypotheses loosely and the scientific method tightly. Evidence changes your mind. - Clear communicator. You write to be understood and reach for a plot or table when words won't do. - Multiplier. You make the engineers and domain experts around you better. - Embraces the ethos of "We, not I." Why you'll love working with us: - Early Stage Equity Package – We want owners, not employees. You'll receive meaningful early-stage equity in a high-growth company, because we want you to share in what we build. - Impact – You'll have the chance to make a significant impact not only for our customers, but on how the industry as a whole approaches test and validation. - Care – we believe strongly in caring for each other. We encourage our people to bring their whole selves to work, support each other, and ensure they are happy in and out of the workplace. - Leading benefits - we invest deeply in the health and wellbeing of our team with leading startup benefits, 0% co-pay across the board, and a $2k/year HSA. - World-Class Backers – Cadstrom is backed by world-class investors: Bison Ventures (Bill Gates), Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt), and the Allen Institute for AI (Paul Allen). All are Welcome. We are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive environment. We are actively working to create an environment of mutual respect where equal opportunities are available to all employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We believe that diversity and inclusion among our founders and employees are critical to the success of our company. ## About Cadstrom ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Cadstrom provides automated PCB validation software that catches design errors before fabrication, preventing costly and time-consuming respins for hardware engineering teams. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage) - **Headquarters**: Montréal, Quebec, Canada - **Founded**: 2023 - **Founders**: Margot Blouin (CEO, Co-founder), Scott Bright (COO, Co-founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Electronic Design Automation (EDA), Hardware Design, Software Development - **Target customers**: B2B; engineering teams at medical, industrial, and consumer electronics companies designing printed circuit boards (PCBs) - **Mission or purpose statement**: To let hardware teams move fast without gambling on “hope it’s fine” schematic reviews, eliminating the costly respins that slow every hardware company down. ## Products & Services - **Cadstrom Platform (SaaS)**: An automated PCB validation service that checks design intent at the schematic level — verifying voltage compatibility between interfacing components, bus signal routing (I2C, SPI, UART), logic polarity, component ratings and margins, and pin/signal assignments. It is described as deterministic (not an AI black box), provides structured insights and citable results, and works iteratively throughout the design cycle. Currently supports Altium Designer, KiCad, and OrCAD X project files. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available - **Key Metric**: Total Funding — $7.47M - Seed Round (Dec 2024): $6.8M led by Bison Ventures - Pre-Seed Round (Aug 2023): $650k led by AI2 Incubator - Grant (Apr 2024): $20k - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Bison Ventures (lead seed investor), AI2 Incubator - **Growth Signals**: Headcount of ~10 employees (+40% YoY); growing team actively hiring (Senior Frontend, Principal Backend, Staff/Principal AI Developer, Operations Specialist roles open); SOC 2 Type 1 certified; remote-first with a distributed team and regular in-person time in Montréal. ## Competitive Advantages - **Deterministic validation**: Unlike AI “black boxes” that can hallucinate, Cadstrom builds detailed behavioral models from component datasheets and runs deterministic checks. Every finding is verifiable, traceable, and citable. - **IP security**: End-to-end encryption, SOC 2 Type 1 certified, and a strict policy that AI never trains on customer IP. Customer data is deleted upon request or contract termination. - **Upstream workflow integration**: Works early in the design process (before traditional stage-gate design reviews), allowing engineers to catch issues when fixes are cheap and easy, not after fabrication. Works with high ambiguity (doesn't need every component fully specified). - **Proven on real designs**: Validated on medical, industrial, and consumer designs. ## Strategic Focus - **Product & hiring growth**: Actively expanding the engineering team (Frontend, Backend, AI, Operations) to scale the platform. The company is building AI-powered tools for electronics design, including automated validation pipelines and data extraction from datasheets. - **Market expansion**: Targeting hardware teams across medical, industrial, and consumer electronics verticals who currently rely on manual and error-prone design reviews. - **Platform depth**: Adding support for more schematic and layout tools, expanding the library of validated checks, and integrating deeper into customer design flows. ## Why Work Here - **Small, fast-moving team**: 10 employees with a flat structure and high ownership. The culture emphasizes hands-on problem-solving: “They notice friction and act on it without being asked.” - **Distributed, hybrid-friendly**: The team is distributed globally (Canada, US, Bangladesh) with regular in-person time in Montréal. Roles are listed as hybrid or remote. - **Hard technical problem**: Building deterministic validation for complex electronics design — an area with massive customer pain (saving $30k+ and 10+ weeks per prevented respin). - **Mission-driven**: Focused on making hardware development less painful and more reliable, directly helping engineers avoid expensive mistakes. - **Perks & culture highlights** from the careers page: Fast pace, hard problem, teammates who “produce through ambiguity,” and a culture that values specific examples over confident generalities. ## Sources 1. [cadstrom.io](https://www.cadstrom.io/) 2. [cadstrom.io/careers](https://www.cadstrom.io/careers) 3. [linkedin.com/company/cadstromio](https://linkedin.com/company/cadstromio) 4. [builtin.com/company/cadstrom-io](https://builtin.com/company/cadstrom-io) 5. [builtin.com/company/cadstrom-io/jobs](https://builtin.com/company/cadstrom-io/jobs)