Full Stack Developer (AI-Native)

PayShepherd is a vertical SaaS company transforming how heavy industries, such as Oil and Gas, Pulp and Paper, Mining and Power Generation, manage contractor spend. Our cloud-based contractor management platform automates the previously manual review of paper-based vendor cost reports, and our anomaly detection engine ensures 100% contract compliance and the elimination of overbilling. We have real customers, and a genuine moat.

We move at a pace that much larger teams can't match, and we're looking for developers who want a real stake in the work, with the ownership and equity to match.

We're not hiring developers to push tickets through a backlog. We're hiring full-time developers who are already living in the new way of building software by pairing with Claude Code, running agentic workflows, and shipping at multiples of the old pace without sacrificing quality.

Every engineer matters disproportionately. The traditional separation between "designer," "PM," and "engineer" is collapsing, and we want people who feel that collapse as an opportunity, not a threat.

You'll work alongside our Engineering Lead and the rest of a tight engineering group, with a meaningful stock option grant that reflects the level of ownership we expect. If you want to be a name on a 200-person org chart, this isn't it. If you want a real stake in what gets built and where it goes, read on.

- Urgency and initiative: moving things forward without waiting to be told

- Ownership and commitment: you treat this like it's yours, because it is

- Humility and ego-free collaboration: strong opinions, loosely held; quick to be wrong; quicker to learn

- Hard work in service of clear, measurable goals: output, not theatre

- Genuine curiosity about what's now possible with AI: paired with the discipline to know when AI output is wrong and push back on it

- Care for security, privacy, and boundaries: our customers trust us with sensitive financial data, and that trust is non-negotiable

- Transparency and honesty in how we work and what we ship

- Driving and enabling value for clients, prospects, and teammates

- Relationship building and follow-through, both internally and with customers

- Relentless attention to improvement

You'll take ownership of meaningful slices of the product end-to-end. You'll design, develop, and ship secure, scalable web applications on AWS, and you'll do it using the best AI-assisted tooling available.

- Has shipped real production code in real systems with real consequences

- Is already using Claude Code or similar tools in their daily workflow, not just experimenting on weekends

- Knows when to trust AI output and when to validate, push back, and iterate

- Cares about how the product feels for the user, not just whether it works

- Treats security as a feature, not a checkbox

- Doesn't need a six-person team and a three-week estimation cycle to get moving

- Design and build robust server-side applications, business logic, and data processing pipelines

- Write efficient, scalable, secure code

- Optimize database queries and application performance

- Implement RESTful APIs and integrate with third-party services

- Build responsive, intuitive interfaces using modern frameworks (React preferred)

- Translate designs into interactive pages with strong usability and UX

- Ensure cross-browser compatibility and adherence to web standards

- Design, optimize, and maintain relational databases (MySQL in our current stack)

- Implement schemas, indexes, and relationships that protect data integrity and performance

- Perform migrations, backups, and data migration tasks as required

- Deploy, configure, and operate applications and services on AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, ALB, and others)

- Build scalable, fault-tolerant architecture using ELB, Auto Scaling, Route 53

- Monitor and optimize performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency

- Apply IAM and AWS security best practices in everything you ship

- Use Claude Code (or equivalent agentic tools) as a core part of your workflow, not as a novelty

- Parallelize work across multiple AI workstreams where it genuinely accelerates output

- Develop the judgment to validate AI-generated code, recognize when it's wrong, and iterate to a correct result

- Share patterns, prompts, and learnings with the team, as we are all levelling up together

- Apply web security best practices throughout development: input validation, authn/authz, secrets management, dependency hygiene

- Be thoughtful about blast radius: changes can ripple across clients with different configurations and workflows

- Recognize when an AI tool is about to cross a privacy or security line and act accordingly

- Work closely with our Engineering Lead and the rest of the engineering team

- Participate in code reviews, technical discussions, and knowledge sharing

- Communicate progress, blockers, and recommendations clearly and early

- 5+ years of professional Full Stack Development experience in production systems

- Hands-on AWS experience deploying, operating, and scaling real workloads. This is non-negotiable; our entire platform runs on AWS.

- Strong proficiency in a modern backend language and a relational database

- Experience with React (or a comparable modern frontend framework), plus solid HTML / CSS / JavaScript fundamentals

- Active, recent experience using AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, agentic workflows) in real day-to-day work

- Solid grasp of web security best practices

- A demonstrably curious, builder-oriented mindset; you should be able to point to something you've built or shipped recently outside of your day job

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated experience

- Experience with PHP and MySQL. This matches our current platform and will help you ramp faster, but isn't a hard requirement if your AWS and modern-stack experience is strong.

- Prior experience on a small, high-velocity team

- Multi-tenant SaaS experience

A traditional interview loop won't surface the right person. Expect a process that looks more like:

- A short conversation about what you're building with AI right now, in your own time

- A practical exercise where you'll work on a real-shaped problem using your own AI-assisted workflow; we want to see how you actually work, not how you perform

- A working session with our Engineering Lead and the engineering team

If your instinct is to ask for a detailed spec before starting, this probably isn't the right fit. If your instinct is to come back with something better than we asked for, it almost certainly is.

- Meaningful stock options: This is a small team, and the equity reflects it. We expect ownership, and we share the upside.

- Excellent medical, dental, and vision plans

- Real autonomy and real accountability

- Career growth in an early-stage company doing genuinely novel work

- New MacBook and accessories

We're looking for candidates based in Vancouver, BC or Calgary, AB.

PayShepherd is committed to achieving workforce diversity and creating an inclusive working environment. Diversity makes sense for us, for our customers, and for our future. We value different perspectives, skills, and experiences, and welcome applications from all sectors of the community.

We welcome candidates with disabilities and will make accommodations throughout all stages of the recruitment and selection process. If you require a disability-related accommodation, please contact us directly.

All candidates must satisfy a background check. We thank all applicants for their interest, and only those selected for an interview will be contacted.