Fullstack AI Engineer (Senior) - IFS Logistics
IFS · London, England, United Kingdom · hybrid
IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.
At IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.
We celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.
By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.
We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.
If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.
About IFS Logistics
IFS Logistics (built and launched as 7bridges, now part of IFS) is an AI-native enterprise logistics platform. We unify transport data, optimise carrier spend, and automate execution for enterprise shippers and logistics companies. We're a small, dedicated team inside IFS, reporting into the commercial organisation rather than central R&D. Pure SaaS, zero consultancy.
The role
This is not a traditional "add AI to an existing system" role. You will own the product surface of our transport execution product end to end: how a customer books freight, sets up their carriers, configures their own rules and gets the documents they need to move a shipment.
Transport Execution & Automation is our commercial anchor, because every enterprise shipper needs it. A senior lead engineer leads engineering in the squad and brings the backend depth; you bring the product surface. You will set the approach for it, work directly with the squad's Product Lead and Designer, and be the second technical voice in the squad. You will also be a day-to-day mentor for the engineers earlier in their career joining the squad. That is part of the job, not an extra.
Your depth is frontend and product engineering. Every engineer here is expected to be genuinely fullstack; the profile describes where your depth is, not a boundary you stay inside. You will write Django, design the API contract you consume, and understand what the data layer is doing underneath your screens.
What you'll work on
- Freight booking across road, sea and rail, including spot quoting, and multi-leg and consolidated movements built on our new shipment data model.
- Carrier integration, including self-serve carrier setup that customers do themselves, without us.
- Self-serve configuration for fulfilment rules, packaging types, products and SKUs. "Customers configure and manage it, not IFS" is a product principle, not an aspiration.
- Shipping and customs document generation.
- New operational areas as the product grows: consolidation and load optimisation, dock scheduling, transport scheduling and own fleet.
- The Django endpoints, data contracts and validation behind all of it.
- Where the agent sits in each of these flows, where a human reviews at minimal, meaningful points, and the guardrails that make that safe when real freight is moving.
What we're looking for
- Around five to eight years building and shipping production software, with real depth in React, TypeScript, state and interaction design for complex, multi-step workflows.
- You have owned a product surface end to end including the ambiguity in it — you closed the open questions rather than waiting for someone to close them for you.
- Genuinely fullstack: you write the Python/Django side, you argue about the API contract, and you know when a client-side answer is the wrong answer.
- Strong on correctness under failure in the interface: validation, partial failure, retries, and knowing what the user sees when something goes wrong halfway.
- You build human-in-the-loop interfaces and treat traceability as a feature, not logging.
- You raise the bar on other people's work. Review, pairing and direct feedback are things you do by default, and you are happy mentoring an engineer earlier in their career.
- AI-native in practice: Cursor and Claude daily, good at giving an agent the right context, better at spotting when its output is confidently wrong.
- You form and state a view. Ambiguity is the job, not a blocker.
Nice to have
- Design-system ownership, or working shoulder to shoulder with a designer on a complex data surface.
- Django REST, BigQuery, dbt, Cube Cloud, GCP.
- LLM agents, RAG or evals in production.
- Shipped an agent that does real work, like agentic audit or fulfilment-rule automation, and the instinct to build a simulation to prove the logic first.
- Logistics, supply chain, freight, or any finance-adjacent domain where being wrong costs money.
Tech stack
- Frontend: React, TypeScript.
- Backend & APIs: Python, Django REST Framework.
- Data & analytics: BigQuery, dbt, Cube Cloud, Superset.
- Streaming & ingestion: Pub/Sub, Datastream.
- Cloud & infrastructure: GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD.
- AI: LLMs, RAG, agent frameworks, evals.
- Developer tooling: Cursor + Claude, Notion (SDD Central), Jira.
What success looks like — first 6 months
- You own the booking and carrier-setup surface end to end, and the open questions in it get closed by you.
- Self-serve carrier setup is in production, and customers use it without us.
- Booking and configuration flows hold up when things fail: no silent errors, and a customer always knows what state their shipment is in.
- The engineers earlier in their career in the squad are productive and shipping reviewed work independently, and can say what they learned from you.
- Quality standards in the squad are visibly higher: code review on all merge requests, no direct-to-prod, acceptance criteria per ticket — real, not aspirational.
Why this role exists now
Transport Execution & Automation is the commercial anchor of the product, and it is where customers see whether the platform actually runs their freight. The senior lead engineer holds the backend and leads engineering in the squad, but cannot also be the only person setting the approach on the product side. We are shifting from feature-driven engineering to agent-led product architecture, and this is one of the surfaces where that shift has to actually land.
You'll need to be based in either the UK or the Netherlands - we're a remote team with clusters of people in London and Amsterdam.
We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.