Senior Applied AI Engineer, Autonomous Supply Chains

About Flexport

Look around you. Almost everything in the room crossed an ocean to get there. Moving one container from a factory to a warehouse takes 10 to 15 companies: truckers, customs brokers, port terminals, ocean carriers, insurers, lenders and warehouses, each with its own systems, paperwork and rules. A freight forwarder runs that whole journey, so the brand that makes the goods doesn't have to.

Most forwarders still run it on email, spreadsheets and phone calls. We call it email freight forwarding. Flexport runs it on one platform, where AI agents do the routine work and experts step in where judgment matters. We've moved $175B of goods for more than 13,000 brands across 135 countries. Our agents handle 21 million tasks a year, and up to 80% of customs work is automated.

Global logistics is a $13 trillion industry, and even the largest forwarder earns less than 3% of global logistics outsourcing revenue. People-powered operations don't scale: to grow, you hire. Software broke that ceiling for taxis with Uber, and for payments with Adyen and Stripe. Freight is next.

Amsterdam is one of Flexport's six engineering hubs, alongside San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Shanghai and Shenzhen. We own four domains end to end: Customs Technology, Autonomous Supply Chains (Applied AI), Platform and Security. See what we build at amsterdam-engineering.flexport.com.

The team: Autonomous Supply Chains

Logistics is famously hard to automate, because the happy path rarely happens. One customer won't take deliveries on a Tuesday. Another wants invoices only on Fridays, with some lines merged and others renamed. Until recently, people handled all of that by hand. Now operators use Forge, the agentic platform we build, to automate their own work: catching anomalies, routing exceptions, escalating stuck containers and adjusting invoices to each customer. Forge remembers every customer's rules and learns from every workflow run, so it gets smarter every day.

Autonomous Supply Chains is our Applied AI team: small, senior and reporting to the VP of Engineering. Self-driving cars are rated from level 0 to level 5. Most of the freight industry still runs at level 0: people emailing spreadsheets. Our goal is level 5 for freight, with Forge as the best agentic platform there is, handling every complexity, every calamity and every odd preference without skipping a beat.

Stack: TypeScript, Rust, Next.js, Temporal, Postgres and Snowflake, with models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.

The role

As a Senior Applied AI Engineer on Autonomous Supply Chains, you'll build the agents and AI-powered applications that make Flexport's operations faster and increasingly autonomous. You'll find the most painful problems in our operations, design the solution and ship it to operators moving freight across 135 countries. This isn't a role where you join a team and pick up tickets.

What you'll do

• Design and ship end-to-end AI agents that handle real logistics work, such as customs compliance, document processing, invoice validation and exception management.
• Build the evaluation, guardrails and human-in-the-loop flows that make an agent trustworthy enough to run 24/7.
• Stay on top of what's happening in the world of AI, and channel those innovations straight into the product. When Jev came out this fall, we had three use cases live within two weeks.
• Work directly with operators, domain experts and leadership to turn ambiguous problems into shipped products, and measure whether they worked.
• Move fast from idea to production, and treat every deployment as a chance to learn.
• Cross organizational boundaries to understand problems deeply and get things done without waiting for permission.

You should have

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, and you've built seriously with LLMs, whether in production, in side projects or just because you couldn't stop yourself.
• LLM fluency: agent patterns, tool use, RAG, prompt design and evaluation. You know the difference between what works in production and what looks good in a demo.
• Full-stack capability in TypeScript and Next.js. You can own a feature end to end.
• Product instinct: you can tell what's worth building, not just how to build it.
• Clear written and spoken communication in English, including design docs that people actually read.

Nice to have

• Experience with workflow orchestration, such as Temporal.
• Experience building internal tools or operator-facing applications.

How we work

• We value builders. People who think end to end, do their own discovery and ship independently. Nobody hands you a spec.
• Your users sit next to you. Operators, customs experts and account teams work in the same office. Watch them use your tool, and fix it before dessert.
• Any model, any harness. Use any frontier model from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google, in all the popular coding harnesses. Our engineers manage swarms of coding agents from their first week.
• We ship dozens of times a day, with continuous deployment and a platform team obsessed with making it safe and fast.
• Hybrid, in English. We're together in our office on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, a few minutes from Dam Square, three days a week*. The other days are flexible. English is our working language, and we work daily with colleagues in the US and China.
• No logistics background needed. Almost nobody joins knowing what an HTS code or a bill of lading is. The experts sit a few desks away.
• Agile, but not dogmatic. Teams decide how they work best.

Why this role is special

• Your work is visible: a small, senior team that reports to the VP of Engineering. What you build gets noticed, and your ideas shape the direction.
• Real stakes: your agents act on real shipments for 13,000+ brands in 135 countries, so the impact is immediate and measurable.
• You're early: the playbook for applied AI in logistics hasn't been written yet. You'll help write it.

What's in it for you

• Equity for everyone: every team member becomes a shareholder in a pre-IPO company in a multi-trillion dollar industry.
• 25 vacation days, based on full-time employment, plus Dutch public holidays.
• Health insurance, fully paid: a collective plan with basic and additional packages. Flexport pays the monthly premium.
• Pension: a defined contribution scheme.
• Breakfast and lunch: daily catered lunch with vegetarian options, breakfast, snacks and drinks in the office.
• Commute covered: Flexport covers home-to-office commuting costs if you live outside Amsterdam.
• Parental leave: time off for both parents to bond with a new child.
• Wellbeing support: an Employee Assistance Program through Aetna for you and your household, at no cost.
• Visa sponsorship: we sponsor visas for the right candidates and help you move to Amsterdam. Eligible international hires may also benefit from the Dutch expat tax ruling.

Our hiring process

1. Application review: our team reviews your application.
2. Recruiter screen: talk about your experience, the role and your questions about Flexport.
3. Remote coding: your first coding interview takes place over video.
4. Onsite coding and system design: a second coding interview and system design in our office.
5. Project deep dive: discuss a project from your experience with the hiring manager.
6. Team debrief: the interview team reviews feedback together. You don't attend this step.
7. Offer: if there's a match, your recruiter walks you through the offer.

An additional remote coding round may be needed if the earlier coding interviews leave questions to resolve. Your recruiter will confirm the plan before interviews begin. We only contact candidates from @flexport.com addresses, and we will never ask you for money or banking details.

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. 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.

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* Three days a week is what we expect from the Amsterdam tech team in normal circumstances. Events, performance issues or a change in team policy can mean more time in the office.

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