Description
Zencargo is looking for a Forward-Deployed Engineer to work at the intersection of engineering, product and operations. This role is focused on solving real operational and customer problems quickly. You will work directly with users to understand how freight processes operate today, identify where software and AI can remove manual work, and build working solutions that deliver measurable outcomes.
This is a role with genuine breadth and ownership. You will help uncover the real problem, shape the solution, build it, ship it and learn from how it performs. Often you will find yourself in a spreadsheet, turning a manual workflow into an automated one. Our aim is for repeatable decisions to run fully automatically, and the way we get there is deliberate: we start by escalating the tricky cases to a person, then learn from how they resolve them so that AI can take on increasingly complex escalations over time.
This is a hands-on role that rewards a strong product brain as much as strong engineering. You will work closely with senior stakeholders across the business, supported by our Data and Infrastructure teams on your builds. Your work flows horizontally too: you will work with Product and Engineering to turn the reusable parts of what you build into scalable platform capabilities that other teams pick up and benefit from.
Key Responsibilities
- Embed with operations teams and internal stakeholders, typically for a few months at a time, to understand complex freight and supply-chain workflows.
- Translate loosely defined business problems into clear technical solutions, deciding when to extend existing functionality and when to build new.
- Turn manual, spreadsheet and inbox-based decisions into platform logic that can be automated and, over time, increasingly handled by AI.
- Build and deploy prototypes, automations and production-ready features, integrating with internal Zencargo services, carrier platforms and third-party APIs.
- Use AI and modern development tools both to accelerate delivery and as a core part of the solutions you build.
- Work with structured and unstructured data, including emails, documents, purchase orders, shipment data and operational events.
- Test and measure solutions against real workflows and user feedback, looking for reduced manual effort, better accuracy, faster processing and a smoother-running business.
- Identify patterns across problems and help convert them into reusable platform functionality.
- Collaborate closely with Product, Design and core Engineering, and with our Data and Infrastructure teams who will support your builds, while retaining ownership of delivery.
- Communicate technical decisions, limitations and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders, up to executive level.
- Maintain appropriate standards for security, reliability, data protection and maintainability, and support solutions through implementation and early adoptions
Success in this role will be measured by the outcomes delivered, including:
- Reduced time and manual effort in operational workflows, and improved speed, accuracy, cost or service quality across the business.
- Faster movement from an identified problem to a working production solution.
- Adoption and effective use of the solutions delivered.
- Reliability, security and maintainability of deployed solutions.
- The number of repeated problems converted into reusable platform capabilities.
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
- Strong professional software engineering experience across the full lifecycle, comfortable taking a problem from discovery through to independently building, deploying and running it in production.
- Strong skills in at least one modern programming language, such as TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, Kotlin or C#. Some familiarity with Kotlin or Python, our primary languages, is valued but not essential.
- Experience building and consuming APIs, webhooks and system integrations.
- Experience working with databases, data models and event-driven workflows.
- Fluent use of AI-assisted development tools as a core part of how you build. This is essential to the role.
- Strong product judgement: understands unfamiliar business processes quickly, embeds with a team to distil what matters, and separates the immediate user request from the underlying problem.
- Comfortable working with ambiguity and making sensible decisions without waiting for perfect requirements, with a bias toward action, experimentation and iterative delivery.
- Confidence working directly with operational users and senior stakeholders, collaborating across Product, Design, Engineering and our Data and Infrastructure teams, and explaining technical concepts in clear, practical language.
- Strong ownership, including responsibility for whether the solution achieves the intended outcome rather than only whether the code was delivered.
- Good understanding of software quality, observability, testing, security and maintainable architecture.
- Experience in freight, logistics or supply chain, or in another B2B SaaS or operational technology environment.
- Experience building workflow automation or orchestration, for example with tools such as n8n.
- Experience with large language model applications and unstructured-data problems such as document extraction or email classification.
- Experience integrating with ERP, transport-management, warehouse-management or internal operational systems.
- Experience in a solutions engineering, implementation, internal-tools or forward-deployed role, including taking bespoke solutions and turning them into product.
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, Terraform, CI/CD and production support, ideally in an early-stage or high-growth environment
Zencargo is a digital-first freight forwarder & logistics provider. Our platform allows customers to book, maintain and keep track of their international freight as well as use analytics to drive intelligent supply chain decisions that help their businesses thrive.
Whilst shipping is a complex trillion-dollar industry, you might be surprised to know that many of the processes that could be simplified with technology are currently done over the phone, by fax and email or even jotted down on scraps of paper
Our services include ocean, air and rail freight as well as trucking and cargo insurance. We deliver significant time, paper and financial savings to our customers offering instant quoting, easy booking and an online dashboard to give them 360 degree, 24/7 visibility on their shipments. Shippers and their counterparts collaborate to oversee their logistics on Zencargo and all their supply chain data is stored together in the cloud making business analytics easier than ever.
At Zencargo, we believe that technology can simplify logistical complexity and tear down barriers to trade. Automating trade and logistics operations and providing access to data and analysis will help companies to trade smarter and more efficiently, freeing businesses to concentrate on key outcomes. Only by combining human endeavour and technology, can we build smarter supply chains that know no borders.
Life at Zencargo What’s in it for me? - Zencargo is where you come to do something you're passionate about, and learn new things. We are in scale mode at Zencargo and we work to realistic growth targets and metrics. You will thrive here if you enjoy working in a scaling environment. As we grow we want you to grow with us.
- At Zencargo there is a huge opportunity to build your experience and grow your career. We want you to be part of the team for a long time to come, and we will focus on helping you get to where you want to be. We all have dreams and aspirations. As part of the Zencargo team, we ask you to deliver your optimum work and help us create real value for our customers and teams.
Work, Life and Balance At Zencargo, we work hard! We do, however, realise that you have family, friends, interests and life outside the world of work. As a scaling business, we constantly evolve our reward and benefits approach.
Here are some highlights!
United Kingdom - Generous Annual Leave
- Flexible, Remote and Hybrid Working
- Home Equipment Allowance
- BUPA Private Medical Insurance
- Annual L&D Budget
- Paid Volunteering Days
- Pension Scheme
- Enhanced Maternity, Paternity, Adoption and Shared Parental Leave & Pay
Netherlands - 33 days paid holiday annually, including statutory Dutch national public holidays
- Pension Scheme
- Flexible, Remote and Hybrid Working
- Home Equipment Allowance
- Annual L&D Budget
- Paid Volunteering Days
- Enhanced Maternity, Paternity, Adoption and Shared Parental Leave & Pay
United States - 33 days paid holiday annually, pro rata, including national public holidays and Veteran’s Day
- Home Equipment Allowance
- 401K Pension Scheme
- Private healthcare scheme
- Annual L&D Budget
- Paid Volunteering Days
- Enhanced Maternity, Paternity, Adoption and Shared Parental Leave & Pay
Our Vision, Mission and ValuesZencargo is a company driven by our
Vision, Mission and Values. We conduct values interviews as part of our recruitment process to ensure we are able to hire top talent that embodies concepts that align with our core values and beliefs.
- Our Zencargo Vision - "A world with smarter trade"
- Our Zencargo Mission - "To make customers' supply chain their competitive advantage"
Our Zencargo Values - We Learn Fast and Grow
- We Build Trust
- We Take Ownership
- We Deliver Outcomes
A Fair Chance Every role in the Zencargo team is open to applications from all sections of society. We believe in the superpowers and potential of everyone, regardless of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other difference that makes you, you.
More than just encouraging your application, we're committed to conscious inclusion that (we hope and intend) cultivates an environment of belonging.
We open our doors to those who share these motivations.
