Principal Engineer — DevX & AI
- Compensation
- CA$150K–CA$195K / yr
- Location
- Montreal
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Not specified
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 10+ years of professional engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record as a Staff or Principal engineer who has shaped platforms, APIs, or developer tooling used by external builders.
- Deep expertise in designing and shipping public APIs and SDKs, including versioning strategy, backwards compatibility, and developer ergonomics — strong opinions about what makes an API delightful vs.
- Expert-level proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and React — the primary interface language for LLMs and developers on this platform.
- Hands-on experience building CLI tooling and local developer workflows (scaffolding, hot reload, file-based config, deploy commands).
- Solid understanding of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or equivalent agentic tool-use interfaces, and practical experience building tools that AI agents can reliably invoke.
- Experience building systems at global scale on cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), with deep knowledge of containerization, CI/CD, and infrastructure-as-code.
- Ability to write and reason about LLM-friendly documentation and API surfaces: you understand that token-efficiency, predictability, and schema clarity matter as much as human readability.
- Exceptional technical communication: clear RFCs and ADRs, productive architecture reviews, and the ability to explain second-order consequences to engineering and business leadership.
- Comfort operating in a greenfield context — you define the structure rather than inherit it.
Nice to have
- Prior experience in game tech, digital commerce, or storefront platforms — understanding the publisher/developer relationship and headless vs. hosted deployment patterns.
- Experience building platforms where AI agents are a first-class user: MCP servers, LLM tool registries, agent eval pipelines.
- Familiarity with Figma's plugin/component API, design token standards, and design-to-code pipelines.
- Contributions to open-source developer tooling, SDK frameworks, or API standards.
- Background in block or extension marketplace design: sandboxing third-party code, schema validation, publisher ecosystems.
- Published technical writing, conference talks, or influential community presence in developer tooling or AI-native development.
Full description
ABOUT YOU
We are looking for a Principal Engineer to take architectural ownership of the agent-readable Shop Builder platform. This is the most senior individual contributor role on the DevX and AI team, and the decisions you make here — which surfaces to expose, which formats to support, which standards to set — will bind the platform for years.
You are not a manager, but your influence is org-wide. You define how developers and AI agents interact with Shop Builder's foundational capabilities: UI as Data, custom blocks, themes, data binding, catalog, payments. You are the technical authority on what the platform exposes and how, and you are deeply hands-on with the hardest parts of that work.
ABOUT US
Xsolla is a global payments and commerce platform for the games industry, used by thousands of publishers to monetize, distribute, and operate their titles worldwide. Shop Builder is Xsolla's storefront platform — used by publishers and game developers to launch and operate game shops, from straightforward catalog and webshops to fully custom storefronts built headless on our backend. For more information, visit xsolla.com.
The DevX and AI team owns the public APIs, documentation, and AI features that give developers — and AI agents — the full surface they need to customize and extend Shop Builder. This is a net-new team of seven, standing up to fill a real gap: no dedicated team has owned the developer surface end to end. That changes now.
Responsibilities
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Own the technical architecture of the agent-readable Shop Builder platform: which APIs to expose, in what shape, through which surfaces (REST, SDK, MCP, CLI).
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Define the interface contracts that LLMs and developers interact with — React component APIs, custom block schemas, theme tokens, data binding formats — and maintain them with the rigor of a public API.
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Design and lead delivery of the MCP server that allows AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to build, deploy, and operate Shop Builder storefronts end-to-end without the editor in the loop.
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Architect the CLI and local development environment: how developers scaffold projects, iterate locally, preview changes, and push to production.
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Define the deploy, versioning, and rollback model for developer-published content — custom blocks, themes, and layouts.
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Design the sandbox and preview environment system so agents and developers can iterate without touching live partner sites.
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Set the documentation standard: written for LLMs and humans as first-class users, maintained from single canonical sources and published to every surface (CLI help, dev docs, MCP tool descriptions, AI context).