Backend Engineer [Mid-Level]

Portcast is a venture-backed, Singapore-based logistics technology startup helping freight forwarders turn data into better decisions and measurable business impact.

Portcast uses AI to surface shipment exceptions, cost risks, and the right actions, helping teams focus on the shipments that need their attention, keep freight costs under control, and make procurement decisions with confidence. Our vision is to be the AI data and intelligence layer that powers exception management and margin improvement on every shipment.

Founded in 2018 and backed by leading technology investors, we are building for an industry at a critical inflection point of digital transformation. Our team of software engineers, data scientists, and logistics experts is on a mission to build the technology that helps freight forwarders protect margin, improve operational efficiency, and differentiate their offering.
ABOUT THE ROLE:

As our Backend Engineer, you will be reporting directly to our Engineering Manager and will work closely with our Product team to develop new products, scale existing ones and manage deployments and architecture. You won't just take tickets here.

You'll dig into how the system actually works, ask why before how, and chase a problem past the surface to the real cause. Curiosity isn't a nice-to-have on this team, it's how we build.

WHAT YOU’LL OWN:

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Design, build and maintain APIs, services and systems and debug production issues across multiple levels of the stack.

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Collaborate closely with our Business, Product and Data Science teams to understand and solve customer pain points at scale.

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Design, Develop, Implement and Deploy enterprise level, high availability web application platforms, with support from the design team at Portcast .

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Create a technology infrastructure that functions well at scale. You will design and improve the system architecture.

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Own end-to-end the design AND implementation of how our product handles real-time data at scale, from event ingestion across dozens of carrier sources, through data normalization, through ML-powered risk and ETA models, to the user-visible recommendations our enterprise customers act on.

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Build features customers actually use, harden internal tooling the team relies on, and create the alerting and monitoring surfaces that catch issues before customers do. You're a builder first, with the judgment to know what's worth building.

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Make architecture trade-offs explicit and defensible.

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Instrument what you build, find real bottlenecks, and pick fixes that survive the next 10× of growth, not just the next sprint. You measure before you optimize, and your numbers are reproducible.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

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Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or equivalent work experience in the field.

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Work Experience: Minimum 5+ years of experience in a technical role designing, developing and releasing technical solutions and building production systems.

- Curious by Default: You dig deeper instead of following instructions to the letter. When something in the system surprises you, you chase the why, not just the fix. You treat every layer of the stack as something worth understanding, and you ask the good questions early.

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System Architecture: You understand how parts of a system fit together and have a strong background in building scalable products or systems. You are comfortable in dealing with lots of moving pieces/data sources and possess meticulous attention to detail. You are quick to generate ideas and give suggestions on how to improve the tech stack and feature developments.

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First Principles Thinker: When you explain a past decision, the trade-offs come out before the tools. You name the constraint, the alternatives you considered, and why you picked what you picked. You don't reach for a new framework when a tighter use of an existing tool would do the job.

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You use AI tools (Copilot, Cursor, Cla