Routing EngineerPackfleet

At Packfleet we’re empowering independent businesses across the UK with the best deliveries on Earth, using latest technology and unmatched customer service.

We're looking for a Routing Engineer to join our team and help us take our in-house vehicle router, written in Rust, to the next level. If you're passionate about solving complex problems, have a background or strong interest in routing algorithms and optimisation, and are excited about making a real impact on the logistics industry, we want to hear from you!

Some of the most interesting problems we’re working on at the moment are:

• Using a 3D time matrix to generate routes that are time-of-day accurate.
• Taking into account the charge levels of our 100% electric fleet.
• Scaling time-windowed deliveries to thousands per day while maintaining efficiency.
• Incorporating on-demand same-day deliveries and address changes into our routes.
• Simulating demand and scale so we’re always one step ahead of our growth.

What you’ll be doing day to day:

• Evolving our in-house vehicle router to help scale Packfleet into the future.
• Writing high-performance code to achieve better routes faster.
• Adapting and extending our routing algorithms & heuristics to tailor routes to our unique needs. For example, we are very interested in planning routes that take into account driver happiness!
• Working with the rest of the engineering team to better integrate the routing into our product. Some examples are live re-routing based on traffic, dynamically pricing time windowed deliveries based on capacity and same-day deliveries.
• Contributing to strategic discussions around our product, operations, and business direction.
• Getting hands-on, understanding the logistics from the ground up to gain a better insight into the problems we're trying to solve.

🛠 Engineering at Packfleet

Our tech stack leans heavily on Typescript on both the backend and frontend, using Next.js and Nest.js (respectively) with Postgres as our data store. We utilise Prisma for a typed auto-generated interface to our data store and GraphQL as a typed auto-generated API between the backend and web (and iOS) frontend.

For our backend infrastructure we use Google Cloud Platform, with our services hosted primarily on App Engine, with some internal tools on Cloud Run along with making use of Cloud Storage, PubSub, BigQuery and Firebase Authentication. On the frontend we use Vercel. Sentry handles our error reporting in both cases, GitHub Actions manage automated testing with Cloud Build or Vercel providing automated deployment.

We tend towards paying for tools or services as opposed to building them ourselves, if we can put money towards a problem that would otherwise take a lot of our time whilst still creating the user experience we desire than we’ll aim to do so. We’ll try to keep our investments in a few tools/services rather than having many ways to save the same problems, and are conscious of the number of innovation tokens we spend.

It’s good to know what to expect and a little about how we do things currently, but there’s plenty to improve and the mindset you bring is far more important than your familiarity with our tech stack or tools. So if you’re not so familiar with some of the tools or languages then don’t let that dissuade you, your way of thinking and experience is much more important.

🏡 Logistics

This role is based at our office/depot in Bermondsey, London. We currently work in a hybrid set-up, where we aim to spend at least 2 days/week together in the office and working remotely the rest of the time, keeping us close to the drivers in the team and the physical elements of our business whilst also giving flexibility for remote working.

💌 How to apply

You can apply here in just a few minutes, and if you have any questions or queries you’re welcome also to drop an email to jobs@packfleet.com as well. We are able to sponsor visas for this role.

💛 Our commitment to diversity

We care deeply about creating a diverse team so we particularly encourage applications from people from different underrepresented demographics and encourage you, regardless of your background and past experience, to apply if the role excites you.

If we want to solve problems for people across the UK (and one day around the world), our team has to represent those we’re solving them for. So we need to attract the best talent and create an environment that supports and includes them.