Toqua is an award-winning AI start-up based in Ghent, Belgium, and makes every ship at sea run at peak efficiency, cutting fuel costs and emissions at an industrial scale. Fuel is a shipping company's biggest cost and its biggest source of emissions, yet most operators still decide how fast to sail or when to do maintenance based on gut feel and rule-of-thumb estimates. Toqua fixes this with an IoT-based AI model of each ship, turning guesswork into real savings.
We're trusted by leading shipowners worldwide, and we're growing our engineering team to
accelerate that impact. Toqua consists of a young & dynamic team that values ideas over hierarchy. We’re convinced work should be a place of permanent learning that lifts yourself and those around you. Most importantly, we believe job satisfaction comes from working on something you care about.
The Role
We're looking for an engineer who cares about the product, not just the code: someone who'll own a problem from the customer conversation to the shipped feature and have a real say in what we build.
What you'll do
- Own initiatives end to end. Take a problem from customer conversation through research, scoping, design, build, ship, and iteration. You'll be trusted to run something significant from start to finish, with the judgment calls along the way being yours.
- Shape what we build. You'll be an important voice in our product conversations. You talk directly to customers, you see where the product gets in their way, and you bring that back as a clear point of view on what's worth doing next.
- Go deep on the domain. Ships are complex physical systems described by messy data. Why a hull fouls and what it costs. What a noon report quietly gets wrong. What numbers a customer will actually trust. This is the most interesting part of the job, and it's where good product decisions come from.
- Build things that hold up. Customers make real operational and commercial decisions on what we ship, so it has to be right.
Your experience
- Comfortable across the stack. Our stack is Python, Postgres, React, TensorFlow, Azure, Terraform, and Kubernetes. Experience in a different stack transfers easily.
- 3 to 5 years shipping software you owned. What you've built and taken responsibility for matters more than the number.
- AI-native. You go all-in on agentic engineering but remain critical. You can tell good code from bad, and you question what’s handed to you instead of merging it.
- An eye for interfaces. You don't need to be a designer, but you should be able to tell a good screen from a bad one and care about the difference.
- Nice to have: Experience with time-series or sensor data, DevOps, or exposure to shipping, physics or mechanical engineering.
(Not sure you tick every box? Apply. We hire for trajectory and judgment.)
What makes you a great fit
- You take ownership. You move projects forward without direction and care deeply about the quality and impact of what you build.
- You think in structure. You can hold a large, vague project in your head, break it into pieces, and keep everyone clear on where it stands.
- You have a high bar. You find your own mistakes before customers do.
- You're driven by impact. Our mission is to cut emissions at scale, and you want your work pointed at that.
- You have product instinct. You question requirements rather than just taking them. You can tell what matters to a customer apart from what's interesting to build.
- You're pragmatic. You know which corners you can cut and which ones you can't.
- You learn fast. New tools, new domains, unfamiliar problems.
How we work
- Fast. We release multiple times a day: a request in Slack can be live an hour later.
- Direct communication. You'll talk directly with the people you work with, and with the people who use what you build.
- Flat structure. Your ideas matter as much as anyone else's.
- Cross-functional collaboration. You'll work closely with researchers, business minds, and end users.
- Mission-driven. Cutting emissions is what guides our priorities.
- Stock options
- Work arrangement: on-site / hybrid
- Laptop and phone subscription
- Mobility budget
- Meal and eco-vouchers
- Health insurance: collective hospitalization insurance coverage
Next
Interested? Here's what happens next:
Application → Intro call → Technical & product exercise → Team chat → Reference calls → Offer.
The exercise is a real problem, end to end: you'll work out what matters, scope it, and build it, using whatever tools you'd normally reach for. We care about your judgment as much as your code.
We move fast and do our best to share clear, honest feedback after each step.