Senior Ocean Operations Associate

The opportunity:

The role of the Senior Operations Associate is a critical part of making Flexport’s mission to make global trade easy for everyone a reality. In this role, your direct customers are the partners within your region: our account management and customs teams, subcontractors, carriers, terminals and trucking providers. Your work directly supports Flexport’s end customers in achieving their logistics goals. Most importantly, you will play a pivotal role in building the next operational model at Flexport: allowing us to effectively scale to achieve our mission of making global trade easier for everyone.

This role is designed to build up Flexport’s operational footprint by both taking up ocean FCL shipments directly and exploring ways to enhance our local footprint and offers the chance to build. You will work cross-functionally to navigate ambiguous challenges and establish a world-class operating team. Being a Senior Operations Associate, you will be involved in both the daily operations as well as helping to expand the team.

Tactical Responsibilities:

As a supply chain talent, you are an expert in executing the end-to-end movement of ocean shipments within a regional network including FCL and LCL imports and exports.

• You will be responsible for the export handling of ocean freight shipments within a regional network following local standard operating procedures (SOP) with clearly defined digital service level agreements (SLA).
• You will give recommendations on how to expand our footprint and contribute to the growth in Qingdao.
• You will personally represent Flexport’s value proposition by recommending supply chain solutions for new clients and opportunities to the account management team.
• You will guard the “front line” in ensuring the highest standard of Flexport quality: the right processes and metrics are in place for shipments to move “on-time” and exceptions resolved quickly and appropriately. You will be responsible for meeting internal KPIs and SLAs that demonstrate quality delivery.
• Serve as the primary focal point for shippers and clients which you are assigned to take care of. You will be the primary point of contact for first-level internal and external escalations.

Adaptive Responsibilities:

• You will work with gateway and regional management to ensure the right metrics and data are in place to deliver great performance.
• You will be responsible for monitoring and improving operational performance and support growth.
• You will act as subject matter expert (SME) to support key initiatives and experiment with the best ways to drive growth.
• You will be an active student, learning the skills of leadership which Flexport will strive to apprentice.
• You will work with Account Management to design and iterate on effective feedback loops to ensure client needs are met.
• You will act as a strategic consultant to your global counterparts, product & engineering and the operations excellence team on ocean supply chain operations and your regional gateway ocean or network operations strategy.
• You will help to take over and optimize operational infrastructure and procedures while identifying and executing on opportunities to increase efficiency and productivity over time.

What you will need:

Experience:

• BA/BS degree
• Minimum 3+ years of experience in logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain, ocean carrier operations, or consulting (ocean freight knowledge is a plus)

Mindset:

We’re looking for folks that have:

• Excitement to manage relations and create a best-in-class operational structure
• Hands-on, process-oriented, structured thinker with strong problem-solving capabilities
• Strategic vision and ground floor execution
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and organizational skills
• Client service mindset - obsessed with client satisfaction
• A mastery of internal and external communication
• Courage to challenge the status quo when logic and reason require it. See something broken? Fix it!
• The desire to lead, train and develop up and coming industry talent

Skills:

• Excitement to build things from the ground up
• Engaging a customer with empathy and without bias
• Pressure testing qualitative and quantitative work
• Designing processes
• Communicating with structure (“A mastery of (internal) communication”)
• Managing time and commitments (“Next-level attention to detail”)
• Investigating and troubleshooting the customer’s problem
• Execute complex processes without missing adaptive opportunities
• Applying policy, process, and best practices
• Organizing, leading, and participating in meetings
• Leading by example and inspiring others
  
  

What you will learn:

• How to work cross-functionally to execute quickly and build a new organization, optimizing for scale and efficiency
• How to motivate teams and lead performance in an ambiguous environment, research and implement operational hypotheses and inform the strategy of a newly built team.
• You will gain the ability to continuously improve the client experience through a deep industry understanding. You are singularly positioned to realize how we can both work within and push the ocean industry forward to meet the standards of Flexport’s client-centric service.
  
  

Future tracks this role could lead to:

• Becoming a leader. You learn how to be a player-coach who apprentices team members on skill development.
• Deep expertise in a specific area of supply chain management. You are the leading advisor in this area, someone our clients, partners, and internal teams go to for advice and strategy. You build processes and tools or lead webinars to amplify your knowledge.
• Client advisor / account management. Your deep passion for the custom experience sets you on a path to lead a team of advisors as they help grow Flexport’s book of business.