About Powered by People (PBP) Powered by People (PBP) is the connective infrastructure between independent maker brands and the world's largest retail and AI-shopping surfaces. Through a single integration, our brands reach 200+ of the best US marketplaces and digital retailers and, increasingly, the AI agents that shoppers now use to discover and buy.

Our mission is to help artisans, small-batch producers, and ethical brands grow by giving them access to modern technology, data, and distribution they could never build alone.

We're building our catalogue-intelligence layer: the system that structures, enriches, and optimizes maker catalogs so they are discoverable and transactable wherever commerce happens traditional retailer search, marketplaces, and agentic surfaces like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. We believe the next decade of commerce will be increasingly mediated by AI agents, and PBP is building the catalogue intelligence and trust infrastructure that lets independent brands win in that world.

The Role We're looking for a Software Engineer to help build the systems at the center of agentic commerce. You'll design and ship backend services, data pipelines, and AI-driven features that make tens of thousands of independent products structured, trustworthy, and discoverable across retail and AI agent surfaces.

This is a high-ownership role on a deliberately small team. You'll work on problems like AI-powered product enrichment, embeddings-based discovery, our Agentic Discovery Score, and protocol-ready architecture that enables AI agents to transact against our catalog. If you want your work to matter and to ship meaningful products quickly without layers of process this is the role for you.

What You'll Do Build AI-native features at the core of our platform, including enrichment pipelines, product classification, embeddings and clustering for discovery, and the Agentic Discovery Score that helps brands succeed in agent-mediated shopping. Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs, owning features end-to-end from data model through production deployment. Build protocol-ready architecture (ACP/UCP-compatible feeds) that enables AI agents to reliably discover and transact against our catalog. Develop and optimize robust data models (Postgres, pgvector, caching layers) and enrichment pipelines that keep catalog data accurate, structured, and AI-readable. Integrate with commerce platforms and retail partners (Shopify, DSCO, SPS Commerce, and others) to ensure seamless, high-quality data flows. Contribute to cloud infrastructure using AWS, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code to support secure and resilient deployments. Support our trust infrastructure (PBP Verified), helping create the signals that retailers and AI agents rely on to rank and recommend products with confidence. Work AI-natively by leveraging tools such as Claude Code and other modern AI development workflows as force multipliers. Collaborate closely with Product, Operations, and Leadership to ship features with immediate impact on makers and retailers. Uphold engineering excellence through code reviews, automated testing, documentation, and continuous improvement while helping shape the technical direction of the platform.

Experience 3+ years of professional software engineering experience Exceptional, highly autonomous junior engineers will be considered Experience working in startup or high-growth environments is an asset

Technical Skills Strong experience with Java, Spring Boot, or equivalent backend frameworks Experience with TypeScript and Next.js is an asset Python experience, particularly for AI and agentic workflows, is a plus Strong knowledge of PostgreSQL and data modeling best practices Experience with vector databases, embeddings, or pgvector is highly desirable Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, GitLab CI/CD, and Bazel Experience building APIs, distributed systems, and scalable backend services

Mindset You are AI-native and actively use AI tools to improve development velocity and quality. You enjoy solving ambiguous problems and taking ownership from concept to production. You care deeply about clean architecture, testing, reliability, and maintainable code. You thrive in a collaborative, fast-moving environment where engineers have significant autonomy and impact.

Nice to Have Experience with LangGraph or similar agentic frameworks Experience with AI/ML applications, ecommerce platforms, or large-scale data pipelines Familiarity with search, recommendation systems, or marketplace technologies

Why Join Powered by People? Build the Future of Commerce Agentic commerce is emerging as the next major shift in online shopping. You'll help build the infrastructure that enables AI agents to discover, evaluate, and transact with independent brands at scale.

Make a Real Impact Every feature you ship directly helps artisans, makers, and ethical businesses access markets and customers they could never reach alone.

Own Meaningful Problems Join a small, senior team where engineers own significant product areas, move quickly, and leverage best-in-class AI tooling to amplify their impact.

Work with Purpose Our mission is to create more equitable global commerce by building trusted technology that helps independent brands compete alongside the world's largest companies.

Compensation & Benefits Base Salary: $130,000 – $150,000 CAD We believe in transparent compensation. The salary for this role falls within the range above, with placement determined by experience, technical expertise, and overall fit for the position. In addition to competitive compensation, we offer meaningful equity, comprehensive health benefits and the opportunity to have a direct impact on the growth of our company.