Engineering Manager, Customs - Flexport

Why Customs Matters More Than Ever

International trade is under more pressure than ever before. With tariffs, shifting regulations, and geopolitical uncertainty, customs has gone from a back-office function to a boardroom priority. The recent trade crisis—sparked by Trump-era tariffs—has made customs the single most complex challenge for global businesses. For many, it’s the difference between keeping supply chains moving or grinding them to a halt.

That’s where we come in. The Customs Technology team at Flexport is leading the charge. We are building the systems that help entrepreneurs and global brands navigate complexity, stay compliant, and keep the world’s goods flowing.

The Opportunity

Customs brokerage is one of the largest, most under-innovated opportunities in logistics. Legacy customs brokers are stuck with outdated systems and manual processes—they simply can’t adapt fast enough.

Flexport is growing fast because we’re different. We are the only big tech company in the space, and the only freight forwarder that got founded after the launch of Netscape. Being a tech company, we can move much faster than our competitors, and give our customers the service they expect in this day and age. We can deploy things like LLM agents at scale, in an industry that is ripe to be disrupted by this technology.

What You’ll Do

As an Engineering Manager in the Customs Technology team, you’ll lead a group of exceptional engineers to:

• Build world class tools like our Tariff Simulator, the only tool that gives businesses a real view of landed costs before they ship.
• Automate customs processes to an unprecedented level. Most customs are text based work, which is what agents excel at. 
• Design scalable systems that automate classification, compliance, and filings—turning weeks of work into seconds.
• Partner with product, design, and operations to deliver technology that gives clients clarity, cost savings, and risk control.
• Mentor and grow a world-class 6-10 member engineering team that thrives on solving the hardest problems in logistics.
• Shape the future of customs into a transparent, efficient, and strategic advantage for businesses worldwide.

Things We ❤️

• Leveraging AI in a safe way to eliminate mundane work for customs brokers and automate customs every step of the way
• Modeling complex and ambiguous domains into fully automated workflows
• Building highly performant and reliable Kotlin services on our cutting-edge infrastructure platform
• Collaborating with end users across the globe to create the best possible product: removing toil and surfacing interesting cases

You Should Have

• 2–4 years of experience leading software engineering teams
• Ability to break down complex problems into actionable plans. You need to go deep into details in a domain completely unfamiliar to you, and come out with an end to end understanding to automate it.
• A love of simple, well-tested code that is easy to extend and hard to break
• Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences
• A bias for action—you see problems and solve them
• An aptitude for learning quickly (non-optional)

How We Work

• The latest and greatest hardware and software to support you, including all AI tools.
• Agile ways of working—without being tied to a single doctrine like Scrum
• A modern stack: moving from a React/Flow + Ruby on Rails monolith to React/Typescript, Kotlin microservices on Kubernetes. We also use and love GraphQL, gRPC, Postgres, Kafka, and Snowflake.

What’s in It for You?

• An opportunity to contribute to one of the fastest-growing companies, with global impact
• Daily catered lunches (vegetarian options included), breakfast, snacks, coffee/tea and soft drinks in our office
• Covered commute expenses for employees living outside Amsterdam
• 25 vacation days per year (full-time)
• Fully paid health insurance (basic and additional packages) through a collective plan
• A defined pension contribution scheme
• Equity program: become a shareholder in a multi-trillion-dollar industry disruptor
• Employee Assistance Program (Aetna Resources for Living)
• Parental leave benefit for both mothers and partners