Forward-Deployed Engineer

Department: Software Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Shenzhen, Shenzhen, Remote

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

How success will be measured

• 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.

Desirable Experience

• 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