About this role
The team at Thunderbird builds Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client designed for organizations requiring greater control over their data, infrastructure, and model choices. This staff-level position focuses heavily on the codebase, spending the majority of time writing production code and developing features, integrations, and customizations for real enterprise deployments. The remaining time involves collaborating directly with technical partners and systems integrators to get deployments running smoothly and maintaining them over time.
This role exists to bridge the gap between customer environment needs and core product development, turning one-off requests into generalized product capabilities while providing deep technical support for pilots and proofs of concept. Candidates who thrive in this environment possess extensive software engineering experience, strong full-stack skills across TypeScript or JavaScript and back-end services, and a background in building AI-enabled applications such as LLM platforms, RAG systems, or enterprise search. Independence and clear communication are essential for operating in an early-stage product distributed globally across time zones.
What you will do
- Build and ship full-stack features, integrations, and customer-specific customizations in the Thunderbolt codebase.
- Work directly with technical partners and enterprise customers to turn environment requirements into working software.
- Support pilots, proofs of concept, and early production deployments across partner-hosted and customer-controlled environments.
- Diagnose and fix complex issues across application, infrastructure, identity and access, integration, and data-access layers.
- Maintain customer-specific customizations over time to ensure compatibility as the core product evolves.
- Identify which customer requests should become general product capabilities and collaborate with product and engineering to build them.
- Write documentation, deployment guidance, and runbooks to help partners handle routine issues independently.
What you need
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time building production applications with Staff-level scope.
- Strong full-stack engineering skills utilizing modern TypeScript or JavaScript, component-based front-end frameworks, and back-end services.
- Meaningful experience working directly with customers or partners in a technical capacity where code was actively written.
- Experience building or supporting AI-enabled applications such as LLM platforms, RAG systems, agents, or enterprise search.
- Solid understanding of enterprise deployment concerns including authentication, identity providers, access control, and hybrid infrastructure.
- Clear communication skills with technical implementers and non-technical stakeholders regarding product capabilities.
- Comfort operating independently in an early-stage product where requirements and architecture are still taking shape.
Nice to have
- Experience with self-hosted, private cloud, sovereign, or regulated deployment environments.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud deployment.
- Experience working with European enterprise or public sector customers, data residency, and sovereignty requirements.
- Experience supporting security reviews, privacy assessments, or enterprise procurement processes.
- Open-source contributions or experience in open, highly collaborative engineering environments.
Benefits
- Fully remote work & schedule flexibility
- Company-provided laptop
- Annual bonus program
- Monthly remote work stipend
- Annual professional development stipend
- 24 days PTO per year
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy?
This is a remote, full-time position. Many of Thunderbolt’s customers and partners are based in Europe, so some regular overlap with European business hours is expected.
What is the compensation for this role?
The salary range for candidates based in Canada is $155,000 to $185,000 CAD. Compensation is benchmarked to local markets targeting the 60th percentile of the peer market.
What will I work on initially?
In your first few months, you will help land Thunderbolt’s first enterprise deployments. That means shipping necessary customer customizations, getting partner-hosted deployments stable, and fixing issues found in real environments.