Backend Engineer

Job description

Portcast is a venture-backed, Singapore-based logistics technology startup helping freight forwarders turn data into better decisions and measurable business impact. Portcast uses AI to surface shipment exceptions, cost risks, and the right actions, helping teams focus on the shipments that need their attention, keep freight costs under control, and make procurement decisions with confidence. Our vision is to be the AI data and intelligence layer that powers exception management and margin improvement on every shipment. Founded in 2018 and backed by leading technology investors, we are building for an industry at a critical inflection point of digital transformation. Our team of software engineers, data scientists, and logistics experts is on a mission to build the technology that helps freight forwarders protect margin, improve operational efficiency, and differentiate their offering. ### ABOUT THE ROLE: As our Backend Engineer, you will be reporting directly to our Engineering Manager and will work closely with our Product team to develop new products, scale existing ones and manage deployments and architecture. You won't just take tickets here. You'll dig into how the system actually works, ask why before how, and chase a problem past the surface to the real cause. Curiosity isn't a nice-to-have on this team, it's how we build. ### WHAT YOU’LL OWN: - Design, build and maintain APIs, services and systems and debug production issues across multiple levels of the stack. - Collaborate closely with our Business, Product and Data Science teams to understand and solve customer pain points at scale. - Design, Develop, Implement and Deploy enterprise level, high availability web application platforms, with support from the design team at Portcast. - Create a technology infrastructure that functions well at scale. You will design and improve the system architecture. - Own end-to-end the design AND implementation of how our product handles real-time data at scale, from event ingestion across dozens of carrier sources, through data normalization, through ML-powered risk and ETA models, to the user-visible recommendations our enterprise customers act on. - Build features customers actually use, harden internal tooling the team relies on, and create the alerting and monitoring surfaces that catch issues before customers do. You're a builder first, with the judgment to know what's worth building. - Make architecture trade-offs explicit and defensible. - Instrument what you build, find real bottlenecks, and pick fixes that survive the next 10× of growth, not just the next sprint. You measure before you optimize, and your numbers are reproducible. ### WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR: - Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or equivalent work experience in the field. - Work Experience: Minimum 5+ years of experience in a technical role designing, developing and releasing technical solutions and building production systems. - Curious by Default: You dig deeper instead of following instructions to the letter. When something in the system surprises you, you chase the why, not just the fix. You treat every layer of the stack as something worth understanding, and you ask the good questions early. - System Architecture: You understand how parts of a system fit together and have a strong background in building scalable products or systems. You are comfortable in dealing with lots of moving pieces/data sources and possess meticulous attention to detail. You are quick to generate ideas and give suggestions on how to improve the tech stack and feature developments. - First Principles Thinker: When you explain a past decision, the trade-offs come out before the tools. You name the constraint, the alternatives you considered, and why you picked what you picked. You don't reach for a new framework when a tighter use of an existing tool would do the job. - You use AI tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) where they make you faster, and you know exactly where they fall short. You read what they produce, you don't just paste it. You can defend a code path the AI suggested, or override it with reasoning the AI couldn't have known. You flag AI-assisted decisions in code review and submissions without being asked. We treat AI as a tool that makes good thinking faster, not a shortcut around thinking. - Team Player: You have experience working in a diverse, dynamic and cross-cultural team. This role is an opportunity to drive engineering excellence within the team and participate in key architectural discussions. You are a hands-on goal-orientated engineer who works according to milestones and software guidelines, following agile principles. - Empathetic Communicator: You can communicate nuanced ideas clearly, from real-time remote brainstorming to explaining a technical decision in writing. You may be opinionated, but in disagreements you engage thoughtfully with other perspectives and can compromise when needed. - You've either been an early engineering hire at a startup where you took a technical product from scratch to scale, OR you've owned real system design at a FAANG-tier engineering org, defended architectural decisions in actual design reviews, not just contributed to someone else's blueprint. Either path counts! We'd love to hear the learnings and the trade-offs you'd make differently today. - Tech Stack: Ideally you are proficient with Python-based backend programming, web frameworks like Flask, Amazon Web Services. You are able to design RESTful APIs and are aware of best practices. Experience with Docker, Git, Elasticsearch, Spark, CI/CD is a plus. The specific stack matters less than how you reason about it. Strong engineers in any stack pick ours up quickly. ### WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU: - Globally distributed, remote-first flexibility: Work with a fully distributed team across Asia and Europe, built on trust, accountability, and collaboration. Our diversity of perspectives fuels innovation and keeps us curious. - Tech-first team: You’ll work with like-minded individuals who share a passion for solving difficult problems using technology. - Accelerated growth: Compress the learning curve in a couple of years by owning the web app from day one as your own baby. We are building our company to be the next B2B market leader in predictive global supply chains and you’ll be a major part of our story. - Impact you can see: With a lean structure, your work is effective from the start. You’ll see the results of your ideas and decisions directly moving the business forward. ### Our CORE Values Guide Everything We Do: - Curiosity: We read the code before we trust it. We dig into why a system behaves the way it does, not just how to make the error go away. - Ownership: We act like founders. We don't wait for a ticket to fix what's broken, and we stay on a problem until it's actually solved in production. - Raising the bar: We do not settle for code that only works locally or solves the immediate request. We aim for backend systems that are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and easy for the team to reason about. - Effectiveness: We focus on engineering work that creates real product and customer impact. We prioritize the right problems, make practical trade-offs, and ship solutions that improve outcomes, not just output.