Job Description

At ZeroNorth, we are at the forefront of transforming the shipping industry through digital innovation. Our solutions go beyond optimising business operations, they are designed to lead the industry in sustainability by significantly reducing CO2 emissions.

Our core mission of making global trade greener drives everything we do. Your contributions will play a crucial role in reducing emissions, aligning commercial success with sustainability, and delivering benefits for both profitability and the environment.

ZeroNorth is powered by a diverse team of 550+ professionals with more than 38 nationalities, operating out of global hubs including Copenhagen (our headquarters), Athens, Chennai, Mumbai, Singapore, Sofia, and Tokyo.

We are leading the industry's green transition, enabling our partners to leverage data for actionable decarbonisation efforts.

Software Engineer at ZeroNorth

Sustainability, engineered. That is what we do for the shipping industry — we build software that helps operators optimise voyages, vessel performance and fuel procurement, cutting costs and emissions across more than 5,500 vessels. You can read more at zeronorth.com. Propel is the agentic platform we are building for that. A vessel operator says what they need in their own words, the agent interprets that intent and orchestrates the work behind it, and the operator acts on what comes back. Propel is in production with real customers today and several domain teams build their workflows on top of it, so the platform serves operators at one end and engineers at the other.

Key responsibilities:

• You would join the Propel Core team, which owns the platform itself: the agent orchestration framework, the developer SDK, the contribution standards, and the shared runtime that turns human-in-the-loop workflows into products across maritime domains. The platform is still in its relatively early stages, so there is a lot of opportunity to steer the direction we take.
• Most of what comes next is uncharted. How an agent remembers across a long operational task. What it carries with it and what it looks up instead. What it may decide on its own and on whose behalf. What a turn costs per customer, and what that means for the design. Nobody has built this for our industry, so the work is to bound the problem, ship a first version with the boundaries written down, and then be honest about whether it was the right call. You are also part of the team that keeps the running platform healthy and removes what slows other teams building on it.
• Design happens in the open here and you take part in it. What we write is read by the model on every turn, so clear writing is engineering work in this role. Most of our code is written by coding agents against guidelines we maintain, which moves the effort from typing towards deciding what should exist and reviewing it properly.
• To give a concrete idea of what we work with today, we have listed our stack below. You do not need to have used all ( or any) of it before, but we expect you to be picking skills within the stack up easily.

Tech Stack :

Language & Runtime: TypeScript, Node.js

Backend & APIs: Fastify, WebSockets & REST, OpenAPI/Swagger, Zod

AI / Agentic: custom agent loop, LLM integration (OpenAI-compatible SDK, OpenAI/Gemini-class models), tool-calling & human-in-the-loop, sandboxed code execution (QuickJS)

Data & Persistence: PostgreSQL, Kysely, Snowflake

Frontend: React

Cloud & Infra: AWS (S3, SQS/SNS, SSM), Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions

Tooling & Observability: Turborepo & pnpm, Vitest, Datadog

Your profile:

• First of all, we look for someone who wants to build this platform with the team. We would rather have the engineer who asks whether the impressive thing is the right thing than one who says yes to anything with AI on it. That is how we end up building a platform that drives real impact.
• You have built things that worked, held up and mattered to someone. Your boundaries survive being changed by someone who was not there, your tests catch real failures rather than restate the implementation, and you know when not to abstract.
• You can find something intermittent and genuinely hard in a live system, and walk us through how you found it. You have built something other engineers depended on, and you changed a design you liked because of what they told you.
• You want to talk to the people the platform is for — the operators using it and the engineers building on it. You would rather spend an hour with a vessel operator or a domain team than infer what they need from a ticket, because what someone asks for and what would actually help them are often not the same thing. When the teams building on the platform hit friction, you want to hear it first-hand and treat it as yours to fix.
• You learn deeply and can say what you had wrong going in, which is what lets you arrive without our domain, our toolchain or the agentic layer. We would rather have an engineer who can acquire the next skill we need than one who has mastered the current one.
• On background, most of the people we hire have a degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field — but it is not a requirement. Software you have built and shipped that speaks for itself counts just as much, and there is no ceiling or floor on years.
• If most of this fits and one or two things do not, write anyway and tell us which.

About ZeroNorth

At ZeroNorth, we aim to make global trade sustainable by steering the maritime industry toward zero emissions. Using advanced technology and trusted data, our platform delivers real-time insights to optimize operations and align commercial success with environmental impact.

We partner with customers on their journey toward sustainability, solving complex challenges and empowering informed decisions that benefit both the planet and their bottom line.

Our culture thrives on growth, inclusion, and collaboration. We value honesty, trust, and the unique contributions of every team member, driving meaningful change together.

Let's make global trade green.