About us

 Forward Labs (https://forwardlabs.ai/) is building superhumans, autonomous AI agents for global freight — the backbone of the global economy — a trillion-dollar industry. (think scale.ai for freight)


 

 The company was founded in San Francisco by 3 friends from Xendit (YC S15, 1st YC unicorn in Asia from Berkeley) — early employees of an exited AI startup & 3 Y Combinator-backed startups from 0 to $1b+.


 

 We’re now a fully remote team 🇺🇲🇨🇦🇰🇷🇵🇭🇸🇬. Our team is still quite small (<10) — so you’ll have a massive impact on the trajectory of the business from Day One + working with the founders directly and learning about Silicon Valley & emerging market experience.


 

 Backed by Maple VC, Village Global (with LPs such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc.), and other Silicon Valley investors and logistics leaders.
 

 


What we’re building

 Our platform, Forward AI, allows forwarders to automate their processes from booking to tracking and billing - so they can grow their businesses to move goods seamlessly without hiring more staff
 

 



 Forwarders lose business when they book late. It takes 10-40 emails to book a cargo. Human Agents take 1-5 days on each booking — our AI Agent cuts it to minutes. It cuts costs too, by procuring from 10+ carriers instead of 3. This adds up to 1000s of cargo each day.


 

 Specifically, provision it with a corporate email, and our AI Agent takes care of inquiry, approval, quotation, procurement, and billing. It runs on GPT to talk to shippers, employees & carriers. And, we built a backend OS to pull pricing data & log new bookings like a TMS.
 

 


About the role

 Responsibilities


 
Work closely with various stakeholders (primarily clients & customer success team) to gather requirements and translate them into technical specifications
 
Develop across technology stacks, including frontend, backend, databases, DevOps, automated testing, and alerting systems
 
Work across the entire product lifecycle from conceptualization to production
 
Architect and develop end-to-end operational solutions leveraging AI platform - focusing on accuracy, speed, and scalability
 
Design and develop robust integrations with various external freight (TMS) & communication (email) systems - utilizing APIs or RPAs
 
Write high-quality, maintainable, and testable code
 
Proactively seek and implement improvements to the team’s processes, codebases, and best practices




 Example projects


 
Interoperable operational dashboard: to build a production-ready command center with the correct abstraction - supporting a variety of tasks with minimal customizations.
 
Multi-tenant workforce tool: to develop operational tools & integrations with reliability and scalability incorporated
 
Realtime document ingestion: to establish data ingestion infrastructure for both structured and unstructured data
 
Reverse engineering third-party software: to figure out the right architecture to integrate with external software without APIs - RPAs
 
Email onboarding/integration: to design 2-way integrations with multiple email providers, which even non-technical users can initiate
 
Automated QA: QA automation for UIs, internal APIs, and external integrations




 Tech stack


 We are tech-stack agnostic in terms of the skill sets we are looking for, but the tech stack looks like the below (expect this to change as we grow):


 
LLMs: OpenAI, Hugging Face, Mistral, DocumentAI
 
Backend: Python, FastAPI, Typescript, Supabase
 
Frontend: Next.js, GraphQL, Refine
 
Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Docker




 A great fit, some or all of the following


 
Strong understanding of system designs (idempotency, circuit breaker, message queues, etc)
 
Familiarity with unit, integration, and E2E test frameworks
 
Familiarity with instrumenting monitoring systems for ensuring the quality of the products in production (Sentry, Pagerduty)
 
Is scrappy, comfortable with ambiguity, taking end-to-end ownership to ship, and values progress over perfection
 
Wants to set, maintain, and adhere to great software engineering standards (architecture review, comments, testing, documentation)
 
Never bored of spending time on your favorite newsfeed (e.g. Twitter, GitHub) browsing the latest computer concepts, codebase, and system designs
 
Are enthusiastic about the vertical applications of AI/LLMs in logistics & future of work in particular
 
Comfortable communicating in English




 Bonus points


 
Experience working with AI/freight startups
 
Familiarity with AWS & GCP
 
Want to be a founder someday
 
Strong remote working communication skills



Interview Process

 We expect the process to be complete within weeks.


 
Video Call with founder(s): Values, culture-fit, getting to know more about you, and answer your questions about Forward Labs.
 
[If needed] Take-home assignment/sample work submission
 
Work trial (2 days to 1 week depending on availability and scope): to help you get a sense of how it feels to work with Forward Labs and vice versa. This will include, but not limited to - system architecture, prototyping, demo




 Email albert@forwardlabs.ai for more details.