Staff Software Engineer, Freight Network

Staff Software Engineer, Freight Network

Chicago, IL

About Flexport:

At Flexport, we believe global trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make global commerce so easy there will be more of it. We’re shaping the future of a $8.6T industry with solutions powered by innovative technology and exceptional people. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries a year.

The recent global supply chain crisis has put Flexport center stage as we continue to play a pivotal role in how goods move around the world. At a valuation of $8 billion, we are proud to have the support of the best investors in the game who believe in our mission, solutions and people. Ready to tackle global challenges that impact business, society, and the environment? Come join us.

Build the operating system for global trade

Flexport is building the first modern logistics platform connecting all the parties in global trade – importers, exporters, trucking companies, ocean carriers, airlines, customs agencies, port terminals – through a single, secure cloud-based platform. On this platform we help the world's fastest-growing brands moving goods between any two places on the planet. We give our customers access to better structured data about their supply chain than they have themselves, unlocking insights that are currently locked in PDFs: what you’ve shipped, what you paid for each individual item and what your costs are.

Our platform is built from the ground up, aggregating data from many different sources. We offer hundreds of different data points and our data model is constantly evolving as we continue to build the capabilities required to manage today’s complex global supply chains.

The opportunity:

We're seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our multi-disciplinary Freight Network Team. This team builds systems that are foundational to a logistics business: modeling the hundreds of thousands of ports, warehouses, vessels, and all other components that comprise our route graph. This Network data is used in myriad processes across the company to ensure high quality planning and execution, so data quality and availability are critical. Network data curation has historically been a highly manual process, and we seek to change that. In this role you will have the opportunity to aggressively apply generative AI to improve the timeliness and accuracy of this curation.

The successful candidate will be comfortable working alongside engineering peers across the organization, as well as partnering with product and business stakeholders to champion technical perspectives for our products. Familiarity with the logistics industry is a plus, but not required; we welcome candidates from all backgrounds and provide opportunities for learning about the logistics industry.

This position requires attendance in the Chicago office 3 days per week and 2 days of remote flexibility.

You will:

• Own the technical landscape for our Freight Network systems and ensure the maintainability of the solutions created by this team.
• Design, develop, test, deploy, and maintain systems that represent the real-world intricacies of logistics entities, such as container packing plans and shipment routes.
• Build and launch products rapidly and incrementally, leveraging best practices around CI/CD to facilitate development.
• Collaborate with business partners and product managers to translate complex business problems into elegant technical solutions.
• Mentor and educate engineers on the team and in the larger Flexport engineering community on trends, technologies, and best practices.
• Ensure high standards of quality by defining and closely monitoring metrics and leveraging incident reviews to foster continuous improvement.

You should have:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• A strong technical background, preferably as a Staff, Sr. Staff, or Principal engineer.
• Experience architecting and building enterprise grade systems in a complex, multi-tiered, distributed environment.
• Experience as a technical lead for a group of engineers and a demonstrated ability to lead teams through difficult technical decisions.
• The ability to convey technical ideas in common terms to business partners, product managers, designers, and engineers alike.
• A desire to develop your tooling repertoire. We are tech-agnostic regarding candidate background, but our platform is built with React, Ruby on Rails, Java, Spring Boot, communicating via GraphQL and gRPC/Protobuf.
• Excellent written communication skills. You will work with people all over the world with different primary languages and time zones, so great writing is key.

It’s a plus if you have:

• Experience with elements of our tech stack.
• Experience with generative AI applications.
• A bias for action; when you see a problem, you fix it.

Commitment to Equal Opportunity

At Flexport, our ability to fulfill our mission of making global commerce easy and accessible relies on having a diverse, dedicated and engaged workforce. That is why Flexport is committed to creating and nurturing an environment where anyone can be their authentic self. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical and mental disability, health status, marital and family status, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law.