Software Engineer II, Forwarding Tech - Commerce, Planning, Procurement

The opportunity:

Flexport is a platform for global trade in an industry that comprises 12% of the global GDP. We are the first licensed freight forwarder and customs brokerage built around a modern tech stack. We help the world's fastest-growing brands manage their international supply chains, providing a fully-managed service for moving products between any two places on the planet.

Exceptional software development is integral in allowing us to fulfill our mission of fixing the user experience in global trade. At Flexport you’ll develop products that are 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.

Our engineers are top-notch software developers who love listening to the users, working as a team, and proactively taking the lead whenever necessary. The role involves learning the business of freight forwarding, modeling the work that people do to move freight, designing solutions to make it more efficient, and thinking innovatively to automate much of it. In this role, you will have an opportunity to own the design and development of key parts of our forwarding systems. You will have influence on subsystem design and help contribute to a team culture around practices that are critical to a quality product.

About the team:

We have multiple teams in Shanghai and Shenzhen working on a suite of core products and services that enable Flexport business to scale, including Freight Services Planning, Procurement, Commerce, Security and Infrastructure, IT and Schedules, and so on. We are broadly leveraging optimization models, machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to build the best solutions for our customers. We are looking for engineers who love learning, are passionate about collaborating, and desire to build solutions with a global impact.

You will:

• Build highly available, secure, distributed systems in a microservice architecture.


• Design, develop, test and maintain systems that represent the real-world intricacies of logistics entities, such as shipper, client, cargo, document, carrier, container, email etc.


• Collaborate with some of the best engineers in the industry to work on complex business and technical problems.


• Work closely with business partners and product managers to distill complex business problems into elegant technical solutions.


• Build and launch products rapidly and incrementally. We ship to production dozens of times per day.


• Ensure our products maintain a high-quality bar. We believe in anticipating issues by obsessing over metrics and applying key learnings from post-mortems to all our services.


• Geek out about shipping and logistics. (We do this often.)

You should have:

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience writing software, and a strong engineering background.


• 2+ years of design and architecture knowledge as well as familiarity with object-oriented analysis and design patterns (OOA/OOD).


• Knowledge of at least one programming language such as Java, Kotlin, Ruby, Python or C++.


• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• A love of simple, well-tested code that is easy to extend and hard to break.


• A bias for action. When you see a problem, you solve it.


• The ability to convey technical ideas in common terms to business partners, product managers, and engineers alike.


• Experience building large scale, high-performance systems in a complex, multi-tiered, distributed environment.


• Understanding of performance tradeoffs, load balancing and operational issues.


• 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.


• Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.