Backend Engineer [Mid-Level]
Portcast
Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines +3 moreremotePosted 1 month ago
Skill Required
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Key highlights
- Portcast is a venture-backed, Singapore-based logistics tech startup founded in 2018 that uses AI to help freight forwarders improve decision-making and margin.
- The Backend Engineer role requires a minimum of 5+ years of technical experience building and releasing production systems.
- The role reports directly to the Engineering Manager and collaborates closely with cross-functional Product, Business, and Data Science teams.
- The position offers remote-first flexibility as part of a fully distributed team across Asia and Europe.
- Candidates must have either experience as an early engineering hire at a startup scaling a technical product from scratch, or system design ownership experience at a FAANG-tier engineering organization.
- The role involves end-to-end ownership of the product's real-time data handling pipeline, from carrier event ingestion to ML-powered risk/ETA models to end-user recommendations.
Role overview
Portcast is a 2018-founded, venture-backed, Singapore-based logistics technology startup that leverages AI to help freight forwarders surface shipment exceptions, cost risks, and recommended actions, enabling teams to prioritize high-need shipments, control freight costs, and make confident procurement decisions. The company is backed by leading technology investors and is building for the logistics industry's critical digital transformation inflection point, with a mission to help freight forwarders protect margin, improve operational efficiency, and differentiate their offerings, and a vision to be the AI data and intelligence layer that powers exception management and margin improvement on every shipment. The Backend Engineer role reports directly to the Engineering Manager and collaborates closely with the Product team to develop new products, scale existing offerings, and manage deployments and system architecture, with a focus on deeply investigating system functionality to identify and solve root problems rather than only completing surface-level tasks.
Responsibilities
- Design, build and maintain APIs, services and systems, and debug production issues across multiple levels of the stack.
- Collaborate closely with 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 Portcast's design team.
- Create and improve scalable technology infrastructure and system architecture.
- Own end-to-end design and implementation of the product's real-time data handling at scale, from event ingestion across dozens of carrier sources through data normalization, ML-powered risk and ETA models, to user-visible recommendations for enterprise customers.
- Build customer-facing features, harden internal team tooling, and create alerting and monitoring surfaces that catch issues before customers experience them.
- Make architecture trade-offs explicit and defensible.
- Instrument built systems to identify real bottlenecks, and implement fixes that can support 10x future growth, with reproducible measurement before optimization.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent work experience in the field.
- Minimum 5+ years of experience in a technical role designing, developing and releasing technical solutions and building production systems.
- Curious by default: digs deeper instead of following instructions to the letter, chases the 'why' behind system surprises, treats every layer of the stack as worth understanding, and asks thoughtful questions early.
- Strong understanding of how system components fit together, with a background in building scalable products or systems, comfort handling large volumes of moving pieces and data sources, meticulous attention to detail, and ability to generate ideas to improve the tech stack and feature development.
- First principles thinker: explains past decisions by leading with trade-offs, names constraints, considered alternatives, and rationale for chosen solutions, rather than defaulting to new frameworks when existing tools would work.
- Proficient in using AI tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude etc.) to speed up work: reads and can defend or override AI-generated code, flags AI-assisted decisions in code review and submissions without being asked, and uses AI to augment thinking rather than replace it.
- Experience working in a diverse, dynamic, cross-cultural team, with the ability to drive engineering excellence, participate in key architectural discussions, work as a hands-on goal-oriented engineer following milestones, software guidelines, and agile principles.
- Empathetic communicator: can clearly explain nuanced ideas in real-time remote brainstorming and written technical decision explanations, engages thoughtfully with other perspectives in disagreements, and can compromise when needed.
- Either experience as an early engineering hire at a startup taking a technical product from scratch to scale, OR experience owning real system design at a FAANG-tier engineering org with experience defending architectural decisions in formal design reviews; the team is interested in hearing about learnings from these experiences and trade-offs the candidate would make differently today.
Nice to have
- Proficiency with Python-based backend programming, web frameworks like Flask, and Amazon Web Services.
- Ability to design RESTful APIs and awareness of relevant best practices.
- Experience with Docker, Git, Elasticsearch, Spark, and CI/CD.
- Specific tech stack proficiency is less important than strong engineering reasoning skills, as strong engineers in any stack can quickly learn Portcast's stack.
Benefits
- Globally distributed, remote-first flexibility to work with a fully distributed team across Asia and Europe, built on trust, accountability, and collaboration, where diversity of perspectives fuels innovation and curiosity.
- Opportunity to work on a tech-first team with like-minded individuals who share a passion for solving difficult problems using technology.
- Accelerated growth opportunity to compress the learning curve in a couple of years by owning the web app from day one, and contribute to building Portcast into the next B2B market leader in predictive global supply chains.
- Visible direct impact of work, as the lean structure means your ideas and decisions move the business forward effectively from the start.
Additional details
- Portcast's core guiding values that inform all team work:
- Curiosity: Read code before trusting it, dig into why systems behave as they do rather than only fixing surface-level errors.
- Ownership: Act like founders, do not wait for tickets to address broken issues, and stay on problems until they are fully solved in production.
- Raising the bar: Do not settle for code that only works locally or solves immediate requests; build backend systems that are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and easy for the team to reason about.
- Effectiveness: Focus on engineering work that creates real product and customer impact, prioritize the right problems, make practical trade-offs, and ship solutions that improve outcomes rather than just output.
- This role description was originally posted on Himalayas.