Freight forwarding is a $200B+ industry you might not know about, but it’s the backbone of the global economy, ensuring goods move seamlessly around the world. Freight forwarders—like DHL, FedEx, and UPS—act as “travel agents” for goods, managing the complex operations that keep supply chains running.

Surprisingly, this critical industry remains largely untouched by modern software, with many processes still managed manually or through outdated systems. The eco-system is so fragile that one missed email can disrupt an entire shipment, leading to delays, poor service, and financial losses.

At Raft, we’re building an AI platform to automate freight operations. From auditing invoices and preparing customs filings to syncing information across systems, we empower operators to work more efficiently and accurately. The impact? Faster service, fewer errors, and more time for businesses to focus on growth and customer service.

We’re fortunate to have the support of top investors who are just as passionate as we do about transforming the industry, including Eight Roads (Alibaba, Spendesk, Toast), Bessemer Venture Partners (LinkedIn, Twilio, Shopify), Episode 1 (Zoopla, Betfair, Shazam), and Dynamo Ventures (Sennder, Stord, Gatik).

The Role

This isn’t a pure SRE role, nor is it a purely backend development role—it’s both. You’ll dive into every layer of our architecture: investigating gnarly performance bottlenecks, building tooling to make our systems observable and reliable, and working hand-in-hand with product engineers to improve scalability and stability.

You’ll be joining a small but highly skilled engineering team where your decisions will have a huge impact on our platform and the company’s trajectory.

What You’ll Do

• Own and improve the stability, scalability, performance, and observability of our core platform.
• Collaborate with product teams to design and implement robust, fault-tolerant services.
• Hunt down and eliminate performance bottlenecks across our Python services, databases, queues, and search systems.
• Evolve our infrastructure and deployment processes to reduce downtime, increase resilience, and enable rapid iteration.
• Enhance and standardize monitoring, logging, and alerting across the stack for faster incident detection and resolution.
  Work with our SREs and backend engineers to implement capacity planning, disaster recovery strategies, and performance testing.
• Lead technical investigations and contribute architectural improvements that future-proof the platform.
  Our Tech Stack
• Languages: Python
• Cloud: Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Data & Messaging: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch
• Infrastructure & Observability: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana
  
  

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience in a senior engineering role that spans backend development and platform/infrastructure work.
• Strong skills in Python and experience with distributed systems.
• Deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred, AWS/Azure acceptable).
• Expertise in databases, messaging systems, and search technologies—especially Postgres, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch.
• Solid understanding of observability best practices: metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting.
• Experience improving application performance and scalability in high-traffic environments.
• Familiarity with container orchestration (Kubernetes) and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
  Strong communication skills—able to collaborate with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• High impact—your work directly influences the stability and scalability of our entire platform.
• Complex, rewarding problems—our architecture isn’t simple, and that’s the fun of it.
• A collaborative, ego-free engineering culture where learning and teaching are valued.
  Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and benefits designed to support your well-being.