The opportunity we will capture together: Starboard is building the virtual infrastructure of global trade. We are combining the power of AI, ML together in a SaaS marketplace to create the default platform where global trade takes place. “We will either get on Starboard to catch the AI wave or die in the dust” – quoting one of our customers. The global shipping industry is worth $2.2 trillion a year. The existing infrastructures (ports, ships, custom authorities, etc.) are isolated systems that don’t communicate with each other. This complex network is manually facilitated by human operators using emails and legacy tech built in the 2000s. Previous attempts to modernize the tech layer have failed because of the lack of unified standards (e.g. thousands of players each have unique business processes and paperwork formats). The rise of LLM creates a new opportunity to facilitate communications among the analogue systems, potentially automating most of the human labor, which constitute 85% of the cost in this industry. The rising hiring cost and labor shortage have hit this industry hard, pushing many players into un-profitability. This creates a sharp urgency to adopt AI. Meet the winning team: Sumeet Trehan: Ex-General Manager of Canada at Flexport ($8 billion valuation startup). GM for Maersk India (Maersk conducts 18% of the global shipping) Junyu Yang: Ex-Founder who recently exited from an AI startup. Formerly AI at LinkedIn, Nike, Square, VSCO Andy Jian: Founding Engineer. Ex-Google, Ex-Shakudo (a top AI startup) Traction: We started in March 2024. 7 months in, 2 launched products with 10 paying B2B customers. We recently raised $5M funding by tier 1 VCs (to be announced). Why you should care: Building something big. If we are successful, we will make global shipping much more efficient, reshaping countries’ economy and industries. Your code matters: our customers’ business depends on our products. We hence move fast. We deploy multiple times a day. Your code will be used by eager customers in a matter of hours. Autonomy: we are a small team. You will be trusted to make most decisions independently and carry the responsibility. Living on the cutting edge of AI: the development of AI is breath-taking. We continue to delight our customers by challenging the definition of impossible, leveraging the latest technology. You will be at the forefront of that. Be comfortable with learning. Who we are looking for: A passion for delighting users. You will end-to-end own the experience we deliver to the customers. Good candidates want to fully understand the users so they can innovate on their behalf. Get things done. We are a team of passionate doers. We deliver against ambitious goals with quality in mind. We are looking for people with similar caliber. No ego. As a team, we learn from each other through honest and timely feedback. We thrive on constructive and objective communications and treating everyone equally (CEO included). There is no room to take things personal. Good communicator. Even as a remote team, we communicate frequently because we believe good ideas and products are made together. “Give a task on Monday and I will deliver on Friday” doesn’t work here, because we probably want to iterate a few times by Wednesday. Work hard. No great things come easy. We all work very hard and expect the same from our peers. If work-life-balance is important to you right now, this is not the right place. If you are hungry for success and growth, this is where you shine. We can promise you that you will be surrounded and supported by equally hungry and humble people with a very open culture. Logistics: Skills: Required: Experience working on real products powered by LLM Experience working efficiently with SQL database (ideally Postgres) Python backend Next.js (both frontend and API) Preferred: Experience launching things from 0-1 with some level of user adoption Cloud infra experience (Docker/AWS/GCP) Experience building systems moving large amounts of data (e.g. Spark) Experience working with an eng team in the early stages Location: Toronto Pay: Competitive with equity and bonus.