Staff Software Engineer, Marketplace, Amsterdam

THE opportunity:

Flexport is a freight forwarder and logistics platform and we are using modern software with one mission: Making global trade easier for everyone. We are solving complex problems on a global scale, and disrupting a multi-trillion dollar industry that has remained stubbornly unchanged.

With 18  offices on three continents, we help the world's fastest growing brands manage their international supply chains, providing a fully-managed service for moving goods between any two places on the planet. Our Technology platform handles over $10B worth of merchandise between 112 countries per year.

Our Marketplace group builds systems handling all order-to-cash & procure-to-pay aspects of our business. We are expanding in Amsterdam with new teams to evolve our FinTech products that automate and streamline the financial management of Flexport’s transactions with its suppliers and customers. These systems such as cost allocation engines and financial ledgers, record, analyze, automate and ultimately improve the financial outcomes of these transactions across products and business lines.We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help drive this key initiative that is at the forefront of reshaping the entire logistics & supply chain industries. You’ll work alongside self-starters interested in solving real-world problems and streamlining the inefficiencies in the complex global trade industry. You’ll have the opportunity to reshape an industry by creating the new operating system for global trade.

WHAT excites you

• Think big picture, dive deep into the domain and communicate the architecture of Marketplace systems to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Independently architect and lead major projects which have a significant amount of complexity and cross functional dependencies.
• You play a significant role in the career development of others, actively mentoring and educating the larger software engineering community on trends, technologies, and best practices.
• Craft the architectural strategy, and own the technical landscape, for a major domain in Flexport and the world of logistics that powers global trade
• Design systems that represent the real-world intricacies of logistics services, such as service offerings, charges, rates, bills and cost allocations
• Work closely with business partners and product managers to distill complex business problems into elegant technical solutions

WHAT you’ll build

• A Unified (for all products) Financial Ledger system that, in real-time, captures the cost, revenue and net-revenue when we move freight between any two points in the world.
• Automate the labor intensive daily process of shipment closing (deciding to pay all bills and send all invoices to client).
• Make visible and manage the financial performance of all our products and services throughout their lifecycle, on a per product/service basis as well as on the aggregate (e.g. financial performance of trade lane or mode of transportation)
• Enable Financial Planning & Analysis
• Help bring trade to everyone in the world by ensuring it remains a profitable activity

WHAT excites us

Basic Qualifications

• Technical leadership experience, either formally or informally, for one or more engineerings teams
• 5+ years of experience designing and building distributed software architectures
• Knowledge of at least one modern programming language such as Java, Kotlin, Ruby, C#
• 10+ years of experience writing software, and a strong engineering background.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent experience
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• A love of simple, well-tested code that is easy to extend and hard to break.
• A product-first approach to building software. You are interested in the real world functionality of your programming and is able to convey technical ideas in common terms to business partners, product managers, designers and engineers alike
• Strong analytical problem-solving skills
• Understanding of performance tradeoffs, load balancing and operational issues
• Demonstrated ability to mentor junior software engineers in all aspects of their engineering skill-sets
• Knowledge of professional software engineering practices & best practices for full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, continuous deployments, testing, and operations

• Identifying engineering roadmaps, system architecture and take lead in building this new architecture to gradually replace our monolith

• A desire to develop your tooling repertoire. We are tech-agnostic regarding candidate background, but we use React/GraphQL/Java/gRPC/Protobuf when building services moving Flexport into a service oriented architecture to replace our monolithic Rails backend
• A desire to work in a global organization with engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Shenzhen and Amsterdam

Our stack:

Our continuous releases are integrated with Buildkite and Github. On the frontend, we create our views with React, manage the flow of data with GraphQL/Relay, and test our application with Jest. On the backend, we’re in the process of decoupling our monolithic Rails app and introducing services using other languages, such as Java, Kotlin, Scala, Node.js, Go, Clojure. Our data is persisted in mostly Postgres, MongoDB and Redis. Our stack is hosted on AWS using Docker.

About Flexport:

We believe global trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make global trade easier for everyone. We aim to do this by building the Operating System for Global trade - a strategic model combining advanced technology and data analytics, logistics infrastructure, and supply chain expertise. Flexport today connects almost 10,000 clients and suppliers across 109 countries, including established global brands like Georgia-Pacific as well as emerging innovators like Sonos. Started in 2013, we've raised over $1.3B in funding from SoftBank Vision Fund, Founders Fund, GV, First Round Capital and Y Combinator. We’re excited about the three big ways we’re moving forward after our recent$1B investment from SoftBank Vision Fund in February 2019.

Worried about not having any freight forwarding experience?

• Don’t be! We’re building the first Operating System for Global Trade. That’s why it’s incredibly important for us to bring people fromdiverse backgrounds and experiences together with our industry veterans to help move the freight forwarding industry forward.
• What’s freight forwarding and why does it matter? Freight forwarding is the coordination and shipment of goods from one place to another and it’s what makes global trade possible. Flexport is on a mission to make global trade easier for everyone because we believe it canhelp connect the world and break down economic barriers.
• We know this industry is complex. That’s why we invest in education starting day one withFlexport Academy, a one week intensive onboarding program designed specifically to set every new Flexport employee up for success.