Forward-Deployed Engineer

Zencargo; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Zencargo is seeking a Forward-Deployed Engineer in London to join a cross-functional team spanning engineering, product and operations. You will work directly with users to understand freight processes, identify where software and AI can automate tasks, and build practical solutions that deliver measurable outcomes.

This hands-on role rewards a strong product mindset and close collaboration with Product, Design, Engineering and Data teams to turn reusable parts into scalable platform

Qualifications

• Experience in end-to-end software delivery from discovery to production.
• Proficiency in modern languages (TypeScript/JavaScript/Python/Java/Kotlin/C#).
• Experience building and consuming APIs and data-driven workflows.
• Ability to work with AI-assisted development tools.

Responsibilities

• Embed with operations to understand freight workflows.
• Translate business problems into technical solutions.
• Turn manual decisions into platform logic and automate with AI.
• Build prototypes and production-ready features with internal services.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Engineering and Data teams.
• Communicate decisions to stakeholders.

Skills

Software engineering

APIs & integrations

Databases & data models

AI-assisted development

Product judgment

Ambiguity with action

Stakeholder communication

Ownership & delivery

Software quality

Education

Bachelor's or equivalent in CS/related field

Tools

n8n

Terraform

CI/CD

Job description

Description

Zencargo is looking for a Forward-Deployed Engineer to work at the intersection of engineering, product and operations. This role is focused on solving real operational and customer problems quickly. You will work directly with users to understand how freight processes operate today, identify where software and AI can remove manual work, and build working solutions that deliver measurable outcomes.

This is a role with genuine breadth and ownership. You will help uncover the real problem, shape the solution, build it, ship it and learn from how it performs. Often you will find yourself in a spreadsheet, turning a manual workflow into an automated one. Our aim is for repeatable decisions to run fully automatically, and the way we get there is deliberate: we start by escalating the tricky cases to a person, then learn from how they resolve them so that AI can take on increasingly complex escalations over time.

This is a hands-on role that rewards a strong product brain as much as strong engineering. You will work closely with senior stakeholders across the business, supported by our Data and Infrastructure teams on your builds. Your work flows horizontally too: you will work with Product and Engineering to turn the reusable parts of what you build into scalable platform capabilities that other teams pick up and benefit from.

Department: Software Engineering

Location: London

Key Responsibilities

• Embed with operations teams and internal stakeholders, typically for a few months at a time, to understand complex freight and supply-chain workflows.
• Translate loosely defined business problems into clear technical solutions, deciding when to extend existing functionality and when to build new.
• Turn manual, spreadsheet and inbox-based decisions into platform logic that can be automated and, over time, increasingly handled by AI.
• Build and deploy prototypes, automations and production-ready features, integrating with internal Zencargo services, carrier platforms and third-party APIs.
• Use AI and modern development tools both to accelerate delivery and as a core part of the solutions you build.
• Work with structured and unstructured data, including emails, documents, purchase orders, shipment data and operational events.
• Test and measure solutions against real workflows and user feedback, looking for reduced manual effort, better accuracy, faster processing and a smoother-running business.
• Identify patterns across problems and help convert them into reusable platform functionality.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design and core Engineering, and with our Data and Infrastructure teams who will support your builds, while retaining ownership of delivery.
• Communicate technical decisions, limitations and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders, up to executive level.
• Maintain appropriate standards for security, reliability, data protection and maintainability, and support solutions through implementation and early adoptions

How success will be measured

Success in this role will be measured by the outcomes delivered, including:

• Reduced time and manual effort in operational workflows, and improved speed, accuracy, cost or service quality across the business.
• Faster movement from an identified problem to a working production solution.
• Adoption and effective use of the solutions delivered.
• Reliability, security and maintainability of deployed solutions.
• The number of repeated problems converted into reusable platform capabilities.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Strong professional software engineering experience across the full lifecycle, comfortable taking a problem from discovery through to independently building, deploying and running it in production.
• Strong skills in at least one modern programming language, such as TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, Kotlin or C#. Some familiarity with Kotlin or Python, our primary languages, is valued but not essential.
• Experience building and consuming APIs, webhooks and system integrations.
• Experience working with databases, data models and event-driven workflows.
• Fluent use of AI-assisted development tools as a core part of how you build. This is essential to the role.
• Strong product judgement: understands unfamiliar business processes quickly, embeds with a team to distil what matters, and separates the immediate user request from the underlying problem.
• Comfortable working with ambiguity and making sensible decisions without waiting for perfect requirements, with a bias toward action, experimentation and iterative delivery.
• Confidence working directly with operational users and senior stakeholders, collaborating across Product, Design, Engineering and our Data and Infrastructure teams, and explaining technical concepts in clear, practical language.
• Strong ownership, including responsibility for whether the solution achieves the intended outcome rather than only whether the code was delivered.
• Good understanding of software quality, observability, testing, security and maintainable architecture.

Desirable Experience

• Experience in freight, logistics or supply chain, or in another B2B SaaS or operational technology environment.
• Experience building workflow automation or orchestration, for example with tools such as n8n.
• Experience with large language model applications and unstructured-data problems such as document extraction or email classification.
• Experience integrating with ERP, transport-management, warehouse-management or internal operational systems.
• Experience in a solutions engineering, implementation, internal-tools or forward-deployed role, including taking bespoke solutions and turning them into product.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, Terraform, CI/CD and production support, ideally in an early-stage or high-growth environment