Job Specifications
About Trade Coffee
Trade Coffee is building the future of specialty coffee at home. We've created the country's largest marketplace of exceptional independent roasters, using personalization technology and deep coffee expertise to match hundreds of thousands of customers with coffees they love. Our platform connects people to 450+ coffees from America's best roasters. Every bag is roasted fresh to order and shipped direct. We're democratizing access to specialty coffee while empowering small roasters to scale and thrive.
This new brand is not an extension of Trade. It's a completely new business under the same corporate umbrella, with a different go-to-market strategy and customer promise. Trade will continue to operate independently under the leadership of its own GM, while this new brand is built and scaled as its own platform.
Build the technical foundation for a new coffee brand from the ground up
We're building a new business from scratch under the Trade Coffee umbrella. Not a feature. Not a spinoff. A wholly separate product with its own strategy and customer promise.
You'll be the founding engineer, partnering with our VP of Engineering to build everything: the storefront, the backend, the integrations, the infrastructure, and the AI-powered systems that let a lean team operate at scale.
The concept is validated. Now we need to build it.
What Makes This Different
Greenfield, not legacy. No existing codebase to navigate. No architectural decisions you're stuck with. You'll make the calls collaboratively and live with the results.
Startup energy, established backing. Trade Coffee has the resources, infrastructure, and operational knowledge of an established company. You get the speed and ownership of a startup without the existential risk.
AI from day one. We're not bolting on AI later. You'll build the automation and data systems that run the business: internal tools that create signal from noise and tight feedback loops that drive decisions.
Full-stack means full-stack. Frontend to infrastructure. Shopify to AWS. You'll context-switch constantly and ship across every layer.
The Work
Early focus: Bootstrap the product. Build customer-facing features and third-party integrations that get us to market. Speed matters.
As we scale: Shift toward infrastructure, automation, and the systems that let a small team punch above its weight.
Throughout: Build and use AI-powered tools that automate operations and surface the data that matters.
Tech Stack
Frontend: React, Preact, Vue, Remix, Shopify Hydrogen, Liquid. Right tool for the job
Backend: Node.js, TypeScript/JavaScript, REST & GraphQL; Python/FastAPI a plus
Shopify: Deep experience required. Hydrogen, Storefront API, Admin API, Liquid themes
Database: PostgreSQL, relational design, ORMs
Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, EventBridge, EC2, Glue), Docker, serverless
AI/ML: OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, or similar. Building automation, not just chatbots
CI/CD: GitHub Actions
What We're Looking For
Experience:
5+ years building full-stack web applications. You've owned frontend and backend.
Deep Shopify experience. You've built production implementations, headless or traditional. This is required, not nice-to-have.
Zero-to-One:
You've built from scratch before. Early-stage or fast-moving environments where you defined the work while doing the work.
You wear multiple hats. Infrastructure setup one day, frontend polish the next. You fill gaps where needed.
You ship end-to-end. From initial concept through production deployment. Not just your piece, the whole feature.
You move fast without making a mess. Speed matters, but so does code quality and maintainability.
Engineering Excellence:
Strong architectural judgment. You design systems that scale and make tradeoffs intentionally.
You establish standards. Testing practices, deployment pipelines, engineering norms. You've set these up before.
Thoughtful on technical debt. You know when to move fast and when to build it right.
Security-aware. Especially for ecommerce and payment systems. You don't ship vulnerabilities.
Clean, maintainable code. Other engineers can read your work, extend it, and learn from it.
Mindset:
Pragmatic. You focus on delivering customer value, not just elegant code. You make tradeoffs with imperfect information and adjust as you learn.
High ownership. You build it, you ship it, you support it, you improve it.
Collaborative. Brainstorm together, write proposals on your own, review together. No unilateral decisions, but you come with a point of view.
Engaged in debate. You bring pros/cons analysis, defer to data, and gather evidence when the path isn't clear. Silence in disagreements is a red flag.
Customer-minded. You care about UX/UI because you care about the people using what you build.
Clear communicator. You translate technical decisions and tradeoffs for product and design partners.
Energized by variety. Context-switching doesn't drain you. Moving between a React component and
About the Company
Trade believes that every cup you drink should be the best damn coffee, period.
Launched in 2018, we unite 55+ of the nation’s top roasters directly with drinkers, matching them with one of our 500+ coffees so fresh they don’t even exist yet. Not a single morsel hits heat until it’s ordered, signaling our dedicated roaster to stop and make that coffee. Extra effort? Yes. Worth it? 100 percent.
We’re here to wake America up to everything coffee can be — all in the name of turning coffee drinkers into coffee lovers.
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