Principal Agentic Engineer (Back-end)

ABOUT APPLY   APPLY is the Agentic Customer Experience (ACx) partner for the world's most ambitious consumer and entertainment brands. We bring together deep domain expertise across Retail, CPG, Sports, and Media with AI-native delivery capability, designing and delivering agentic solutions that turn CX vision into commercial reality. We are the partner of choice for brands like Arc'teryx, NFL, Lululemon, and Kraft Heinz. For more information, visit applydigital.com.   LOCATION: APPLY is hybrid/remote friendly. The preferred candidate should be based in Canada, working in hours that align to ET (Eastern Timezone) or PT (Pacific Timezone).   THE ROLE: The Principal Agentic Engineer (Back-end) is a senior technical leader within our engineering organization, responsible for designing, building, and scaling robust backend systems that support modern, AI-powered digital products. This role combines deep backend engineering expertise with strong architectural judgment, AI-system fluency, and client-facing leadership.   As a Principal Agentic Engineer, you will lead technical direction across complex backend systems, mentor engineers, and partner closely with clients and internal teams to deliver production-grade solutions. You will play a critical role in designing distributed, cloud-native architectures and integrating large language models (LLMs), vector databases, and AI agents into real-world applications. You will engineer teams of coding agents to accomplish implementation requirements for the systems you will be building.   You bring proven leadership at a Staff or Lead level, with a track record of delivering complex software initiatives end-to-end. You operate with high autonomy and can take loosely defined goals and turn them into well-architected, shipped software.