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The Role

The Product Engineer designs, builds, deploys, and supports technology for farmers, workers, and fishers in more than 50 countries. This is a full-stack role on the Applied Intelligence team. The people who use what you build are small producers and cooperative managers, not a persona in a deck.

You own the product lifecycle: discovery with users, development, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement. Requirements come out of field research and change monthly, and direct user feedback drives product decisions. You work alongside the Digital Technology team, which runs the organization’s core systems.

What You Would Build

• The producer agent. A trilingual agent (English, Spanish, French) that works by voice, image, and document, designed for people whose connection drops and whose device is shared. Year 1 reaches 350+ producers across ten cooperatives, toward a goal of 5.1 million beneficiaries.
• Impact evidence surfaces. Evidence on 1,030 Certificate Holders in 53 countries, presented so a producer, a cooperative manager, a brand partner, and a funder each get what they need from one shared data foundation.
• Audit platform. Built on Cloudflare Workers and D1 and running under real audit load.
• Reconciliation underneath all of it. Three source systems that disagree across roughly a thousand organizations, resolved without silently averaging. Showing the disagreement is the requirement, not a failure state.

What Makes This Role Different
Fair Trade USA's Digital Technology team operates the organization’s systems of record and sets its standards for security, integration, and data integrity. This role builds new producer-facing products within those standards, in partnership with that team.

• Built from scratch. Nobody sells a trilingual, voice-first agent for small producers on intermittent connectivity. You build it.
• Changing requirements. Requirements come out of field research and change monthly.
• Probabilistic systems. These systems degrade silently rather than failing a test, so you build evaluation, not only test suites.
• A learning loop. You will be wrong often, on purpose, because that is how the learning loop runs.

Key Responsibilities

Product Development & Engineering

• Design, develop, deploy, and maintain applications and services across the full stack, from React front ends to Workers, APIs, and databases.
• Build solutions for farmers, cooperatives, auditors, and business partners, starting from how they work today.
• Turn field research, user feedback, and evolving needs into production software, often from problems that are under-specified because no one has solved them before.
• Build systems that bring together structured and unstructured data from multiple sources.
• Make architecture and technical design decisions, and choose technology where no existing product fits, in coordination with Digital Technology.
• Review code with the Applied Intelligence team and hold a high standard for quality, performance, security, and maintainability.

AI, Data & Platform Solutions

• Build AI-enabled products using hosted LLM APIs and local inference nodes.
• Build interfaces and workflows for voice, image, and document input in English, Spanish, and French, for low-bandwidth and shared-device use.
• Build views that surface insights, evidence, and impact data for producers, cooperative managers, brand partners, and funders.
• Design and implement reconciliation, validation, and transparency across source systems that preserve and display disagreement instead of averaging it away.
• Build evaluation for probabilistic systems: define what good looks like, measure it continuously, and catch silent degradation before users do.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend where they improve the product and the user experience.

Deployment, Operations & Continuous Improvement

• Own deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and operational support for your products. You do not hand off at the merge.
• Investigate production issues, identify root causes, and implement long-term fixes.
• Establish monitoring, evaluation, and quality assurance approaches for both traditional software and AI-powered applications.
• Improve reliability, performance, and usability through iterative releases.
• Contribute to technical documentation, implementation standards, and engineering practices.

User Engagement & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner directly with users, cooperative managers, and subject matter experts to understand workflows and what actually happened, rather than inferring it secondhand.
• Work with product, business, data, and Digital Technology colleagues to set priorities, align on security and integration standards, and deliver solutions.
• Take part in field research, user testing, and feedback sessions that shape product decisions.
• Explain technical concepts, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Support a culture of experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement across the team.

The Stack
AWS, Cloudflare Workers and D1, TypeScript and React, Python, and LLM integration across hosted APIs and inference nodes. You need not have used all of it. You do need to read unfamiliar infrastructure documentation and ship by Thursday.

Key Qualifications / Experience

• 4-6 years of experience in software engineering, product engineering, or full-stack application development.
• You have shipped production software that people depended on, and been on the hook when it broke.
• Experience building across multiple layers of the stack, including front end, back end, APIs, databases, and cloud services.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, or a similar language, and experience with modern web frameworks and cloud-native development, ideally on AWS.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled products, machine learning applications, large language models, or intelligent automation strongly preferred.
• Comfortable owning deploys and monitoring. Not an SRE, but not someone who hands off at the merge.
• You can hold a complex system in your head and reason about where it fails, not only where it works.
• You work independently, manage ambiguity, and balance multiple priorities as requirements change.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.
• You would rather ask a cooperative manager what happened than infer it secondhand, and you have gathered requirements directly from users.
• Spanish proficiency preferred, but not required

The Organization

At Fair Trade USA, we’re leading the charge toward sustainable development and conscious capitalism by forming fair and honest partnerships across the globe. We believe in community, we’re excited about change, and we hire driven, talented change makers who share our vision.

Founded in 1998, we are the leading third-party certifier of Fair Trade products in North America. Our unique market-based model for sustainability links millions of farms and factories around the world to over 1,500 leading brands and retailers through more transparent, equitable trading partnerships. Impact is our North Star: to date, we have channeled over $1 billion in additional income to hardworking families and communities around the world.

Fair Trade has emerged as one of the most promising models of conscious capitalism today. We are recognized for improving the working conditions and living standards of farmers and workers while protecting the environment. At the same time, we strengthen global supply chains and enable sustainability to drive profitability for the business community. For the end consumer, Fair Trade is an easy way to align our values with our purchasing decisions, voting with our dollars for a better world.

Our model has incredible leverage: for every $1 that we invest in building the Fair Trade market and movement, we are creating $4 in increased income for farmers and workers. Because of this unprecedented 4x1 “social return on investment” and community impact, we are a four-time winner of Fast Company’s "Social Capitalist of the Year" award and have been recognized as a leading social venture by the Skoll Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative, Ashoka, and the World Economic Forum.

Our Workplace

At Fair Trade USA, we are a mission-driven organization and are deeply committed to fostering an environment that is built on the principles of JEDI; a just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive community for all. We are committed to upholding an inclusive workplace where all people feel equally respected and valued, and where we can all thrive. We are a proud equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants from every educational background, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, age, race, ethnicity, national origin and ancestry, veteran status, marital or family status, and disability.

We believe in empowering our teams to choose to do their best work and grow at Fair Trade USA. We offer a comprehensive compensation approach including salary, performance-based bonuses, and employee recognition awards, and a generous and thoughtful approach to employee benefits which include:

• Fully Remote & Flexible Workplace with monthly Final Friday half days
• Incentive compensation and Bonus awards
• Generous Health, Dental, and Vision insurance
• Up to 4% Employer 401k Match
• Excellent PTO including 12+ Holidays / 15+ Vacations / 9 Sick Leave days annually
• Annual Winter Break Week with Office Closure from 25th December through New Year
• Six Weeks Sabbatical Leave after 7 years’ service
• Parental Leave and Caregiver Programs
• Mental Health and Wellbeing programs
• Employee Recognition Awards
• Employee Perks and Discount programs with Fair Trade Certified partners