Backend Engineer

About Portcast

Portcast is a Singapore-headquartered logistics technology startup supported by venture funding. The company builds a live transportation visibility platform for international supply chains, helping shippers, manufacturers, and logistics providers turn operational data into practical decisions and measurable business results.

The platform is designed to do more than show where shipments are. It helps teams act earlier on risks, reduce detention and demurrage, speed up exception handling, and close invoices faster using embedded evidence. By converting visibility into action, Portcast aims to lower costs, improve control, and make supply chains more predictable.

Established in 2018 and backed by notable technology investors, the business is focused on an industry undergoing major digital change. Its team of engineers, data scientists, and logistics specialists is working to make supply chains not only visible, but also highly actionable from end to end.

Role Overview

As a Backend Engineer, you will report to the Engineering Manager and partner closely with the Product team to launch new products, scale existing systems, and handle deployment and architecture responsibilities. This is a hands-on role for someone who likes to understand how systems really work, digs past symptoms to uncover root causes, and brings curiosity to every layer of the stack.

Portcast’s platform is already trusted by freight forwarders, manufacturers, and cargo airlines. The company is looking for someone who can help maintain that trust while expanding the product offering and supporting growth.

What You Will Do

• Develop, support, and improve APIs, services, and core systems, while troubleshooting production problems across multiple layers of the stack.
• Work closely with Business, Product, and Data Science teams to identify customer problems and build solutions that can work at scale.
• Design, develop, implement, and deploy enterprise-grade web application platforms with high availability, with support from Portcast’s design team.
• Help shape and improve the technology infrastructure and overall system architecture so it performs reliably at scale.
• Own the full design and implementation of the product’s real-time data flow, from ingesting events from dozens of carrier sources through normalization and ML-based risk and ETA models to customer-facing recommendations.
• Build customer-facing features, strengthen internal tools, and create monitoring and alerting surfaces that surface issues before customers notice them.
• Make architectural trade-offs clear, reasoned, and defensible.
• Measure performance, identify true bottlenecks, and choose fixes that remain effective as the system grows significantly.

What Portcast Is Looking For

• A bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 4 years of experience in a technical position involving design, development, release, and delivery of production systems or technical solutions.
• Experience building or architecting systems at scale, either as an early startup engineer taking a product from zero to scale or as someone who owned real system design in a large engineering organization.
• A first-principles mindset, with the ability to explain decisions through constraints, alternatives, and trade-offs rather than tools alone.
• Strong curiosity and a habit of going beyond instructions to understand root causes and system behavior.
• Solid understanding of system architecture, scalable product development, and working across multiple moving parts and data sources with strong attention to detail.
• Comfort using AI tools such as Copilot, Cursor, or Claude where helpful, while reviewing outputs critically and being able to justify or override AI-generated suggestions.
• Experience working in diverse, dynamic, cross-cultural teams and contributing in agile, milestone-driven environments.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain nuanced technical ideas clearly in writing and in real-time discussions.
• Proficiency in Python backend development and web frameworks such as Flask, along with familiarity with AWS, RESTful API design, Docker, Git, Elasticsearch, Spark, and CI/CD.

What You Can Expect

• Remote-first flexibility with a fully distributed team across Asia and Europe.
• A tech-focused culture built around solving difficult problems with technology.
• Fast learning and growth through ownership of the web application from day one.
• Visible impact in a lean organization where your work directly influences business outcomes.

Core Values

• Curiosity: The team believes in understanding code and system behavior before trusting a fix.
• Ownership: Team members act like founders, proactively solving problems through to production resolution.
• Raising the bar: The company values backend systems that are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and easy to reason about.
• Effectiveness: Engineering work should drive real product and customer impact, with practical trade-offs and meaningful outcomes.

Additional Information

Portcast invites applicants who want to help shape the future of logistics and shipping through predictive analytics and high-performing backend systems.