Principal Engineer

About us

Appnovation is the AI Product Company. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, with teams around the world, Appnovation builds AI products, delivers enterprise AI and digital solutions, and co-invests with clients to bring new AI products to market.

Open source has been the foundation of Appnovation's work since 2007, and it remains the foundation underneath every AI product the company builds today. Appnovation teams work with organizations in highly regulated industries, including global leaders such as Pfizer, Google and AstraZeneca, to help them adopt AI they can govern and own.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to own the end-to-end technical coherence of an enterprise marketing technology ecosystem for our life sciences clients. In most large organizations, content is created and approved in one system, delivered as an experience in another, and measured in a third, each run by a different team and vendor. When the seams between them are well designed, a business result can be traced back to the asset and workflow that drove it. When they are not, creators can't see how their work performs, publishers can't prove impact, and analysts spend more time reconciling data than finding insight.

This is a senior technical leadership role with no direct reports. You will set a single, clear technical direction across multiple platform teams, making sure their architectures, data contracts and roadmaps fit together as one system. You will lead through clarity and credibility rather than reporting lines, and you will help shape new AI-enabled patient and healthcare professional (HCP) experiences that can be built safely, approved and proven in production, not just shown in a prototype.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

• Technical Direction: Define and own one clear technical approach across content creation, governance and approval; publishing, experience delivery and design systems; and measurement, tagging and reporting, with special focus on the content-to-experience and experience-to-insight handoffs.

• Cross-Team Standards: Set shared standards for API contracts, metadata and taxonomy, data governance and security, so a decision made by one team doesn't create rework or data gaps for another.

• Architecture Reviews and Decisions: Lead architecture reviews and RFCs across platform teams, act as the escalation point for the hardest cross-team problems (migrations, vendor consolidation, build vs. buy), and keep a written record of what was decided and why.

• End-to-End Data Traceability: Own the technical strategy for tracing content, experience and performance data from asset, through publication, to the results it produced.

• AI-Enabled Patient and HCP Experiences: Partner with client experience leaders to turn business ambitions into buildable technical approaches, including making services callable by AI assistants and agents and engaging on third-party platforms the client doesn't control.

• Reusable AI Capabilities: Lead a shared layer of AI skills, agents and services that delivery teams and the wider organization can reuse, instead of every team building its own.

• Senior Stakeholder Partnership: Represent engineering to senior client leaders on major trade-offs around cost, risk, scale and sequencing, and explain technical positions in terms that work for marketing, compliance and finance audiences.

• Innovation with Delivery Focus: Prove ideas quickly and cheaply, stop them when they don't work, bring medical, legal, regulatory, privacy and security partners in at the design stage, and get committed approaches into production within a few months.

• Technical Mentorship: Mentor senior engineers across platform teams and raise the technical bar through design reviews and hands-on involvement in the toughest problems.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 12+ years of software and platform engineering experience, with a track record of designing systems that span organizational boundaries, not just technical ones.

• Proven success getting multiple engineering roadmaps to line up around shared data contracts and standards.

• Experience building something new in a regulated environment and getting it approved and live, not just piloted.

• Hands-on depth in applied AI: how assistants and agents consume services, tool and context interfaces such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), retrieval over approved content, and the evaluation, guardrails and traceability needed before a generative system talks to a patient or HCP.

• Experience designing patient-facing or clinician-facing technology, or a clear view of how to handle the extra duty of care it brings.

• Experience integrating with partner and third-party platforms where the surface, data boundary and release cycle are outside your control.

• Demonstrated ability to lead without positional authority, setting direction for teams you don't manage and making it stick.

• Excellent communication skills, including explaining complex technical topics in plain language to senior leaders and building agreement across organizational lines.

• Real depth in three or four areas of the marketing technology stack (web and experience delivery, email, paid media, analytics and measurement, AI, content supply chain, consent and identity, audience data, enterprise cloud) and working knowledge of the rest.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience in pharma, life sciences or another regulated industry with defined promotional review, privacy and security requirements.

• Experience with enterprise platforms such as Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics, Workfront, Veeva Vault and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Understanding the category and its trade-offs matters more than any one product.

• Experience with cloud and edge infrastructure such as AWS and Cloudflare, enterprise GenAI services, identity and API gateways, and custom middleware and integration patterns.

• Content supply chain experience: digital asset management, metadata and taxonomy, workflow management, promotional review and approval, claims libraries and content reuse.

• Commercial fluency with enterprise vendor agreements, licensing and consumption models, and the judgment to spot when a platform’s cost curve, not its capability, is the real constraint.

LEADERSHIP CAPABILITIES

• Technical Strategy and Judgment: Connects business needs, platform strategy and emerging technology into a practical direction, and is honest about which problems need a new approach and which are already solved.

• Influence and Partnership: Builds alignment and drives decisions across teams and organizations without relying on formal authority.

• Technical Depth and Breadth: Brings hands-on credibility to guide engineers, challenge assumptions and make sound platform-scale choices.

• Responsible AI Mindset: Designs for auditability, evidence and safety from the start so new approaches can pass review in a regulated setting.

• Outside-In Thinking: Tracks what is emerging in AI, healthcare technology and the wider industry, and translates it into what it means for clients, patients and HCPs.

WHO YOU ARE

• You have a customer-first mindset and a devotion to customer service

• You are the person people bring the hard questions to, and you are comfortable in that role

• You can explain complex technical solutions to technical and non-technical audiences and connect them to measurable business value

• You engage and build positive internal and external client relationships, while managing multiple initiatives, often with competing priorities

• You have solid analytical, problem-solving and decision-making skills

• You set high standards for quality, performance, scalability and security and seek continuous improvement

• You are responsive and thrive in a fast-paced, diverse, high-performance environment with rapidly changing business needs

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