Engineering Manager, Trade and Financial Services

Moving goods across international borders remains the last and most gnarly problem in unlocking the full potential of global trade. While anyone can found a company these days, set up a webshop and receive international payments, getting a container from a factory in Asia to your warehouse in Rotterdam or Chicago remains so complex that you need specialized people to handle this for you.

Flexport is the world’s only freight forwarder founded after the invention of Netscape. We are the disruptor shaping the future of this $8.6 trillion industry. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move over $19 billion of merchandise across 112 countries annually.

The trade services team in Amsterdam helps entrepreneurs of all sizes make moving their goods easier in four important ways:

• With our sustainability products, we help our customers make the best environmental choices so they can reduce their footprint without increasing their cost or limiting their service. For example, through better scheduling we can move your freight by ocean instead of air transport which is 80(!) times less polluting.
• Our insurance products mitigate risks for customers with valuable goods in transit. Accidents happen, and losing goods before they’re sold can range from frustrating to devastating for entrepreneurs.
• Our capital product offers customers the ability to borrow against goods still in transit, allowing them to reinvest capital that would otherwise be locked up until they can sell the goods after arrival.
• Our Drawback product allows customers to reclaim import duties they paid on goods that they didn’t end up selling. These claims run into millions of dollars of free money we can hand back to our customers.

All these services leverage the larger Flexport platform and the unparalleled data insight we have into the industry to make it just click in our app to benefit from these products.

Team Projects:

• Drawback; we are on track to become the highest yielding drawback product in the world using our advanced matching algorithms and data pipelines to determine which claims we can file.
• Emission calculator in the route planner, allowing you to find alternative routes with less impact.
• Improved dashboarding and insights into emissions to help reduce carbon footprint and align with EU regulations.
• Parcel insurance: protecting our last mile delivery from theft and damage

Things we ❤️

• Modeling a complex and ambiguous domains into fully automated workflows
• Building highly performant and reliable Kotlin services on our cutting edge infrastructure platform
• Collaborating with our end users across the globe to make the best possible product for them: removing toil and surfacing interesting cases
• Leveraging AI in a safe way to eliminate toil and mundane work for customs brokers, and automating customs every step of the way

You will be responsible to:

• Lead a team of 6 to 10 software engineers
• Drive engineering excellence in your team, while being reliable in delivering on time
• Work closely with the other engineering managers, staff engineers, and director of engineering to evolve the tech architecture, and drive engineering excellence and velocity.
• Work closely with business partners and product managers to distill complex business problems into elegant technical solutions.
• Work on systems that represent the real-world intricacies of logistics entities and the process of moving cargo in and out of countries.
• Build and launch products rapidly and incrementally. We ship to production dozens of times per day.
• Geek out about shipping, customs regulations and logistics. (We do this often.)

What you’ll build:

• Figure out the most efficient way for our customers and partners to participate in the process of moving freight across borders.
• Design and build deep, complex integrations with government agencies and partners.
• Automate archaic customs filing processes and save the operations team thousands of phone calls per week.
• Deliver supply chain insights to logistics teams via a world-class analytics experience.
• Create beautiful and efficient domain models for the incredibly complex world of freight forwarding.

You should have:

• 2-4 years of experience leading software engineering teams
• Ability to break down complex problems and processes into actionable plans for your team
• A love of simple, well-tested code that is easy to extend and hard to break.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A bias for action. When you see a problem, you solve it.
• Non-optional: an aptitude for learning quickly.

How we work:

• We come to the office at two to three times a week to hang out, have lunch, white board, and collaborate
• We have the latest and greatest hardware and software for you to work with
• We’re agile, but not married to a single doctrine like scrum. The teams decide how they work best.
• Stack: we’re coming from a React/Flow + Ruby on Rails monolith, and moving to React/Typescript, Kotlin Microservices on Kubernetes. We also use and love GraphQL, GRPC, Postgres, Kafka and Snowflake

Other perks:

• Incredible stock option plan (RSUs), that has tremendous growth potential
• Yearly bonus: a yearly bonus of 12% of your base salary
• Free breakfast AND lunch/snacks: there is such a thing as free lunch (catered, seasonal, warm! We can prove it in our office
• Fully covered health insurance and dental care
• Pension plan