Senior Associate, Operational Excellence

At Flexport, we believe global trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make it easy and accessible for everyone. We’re shaping the future of a $8.6T industry with solutions powered by innovative technology and exceptional people. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries a year. 

The recent global supply chain crisis has put Flexport center stage as we continue to play a pivotal role in how goods move around the world. At a valuation of $8 billion, we’re experiencing record growth and are proud to have the support of the best investors in the game who believe in our mission, solutions, and people. Ready to tackle global challenges that impact business, society, and the environment? Come join us.

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, you will work with different internal and external team stakeholders, such as internal ocean gateway operations teams, account management and customs teams, and other functions to continuously identify areas to improve, drive alignment, and lead implementations. 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 your leadership capabilities and communication & project management skills within a global operations team. 

As a senior operations associate focusing on product, you are expected to utilize knowledge of the end-to-end shipment operations process and be equipped with a process-driven, data-driven, and continuous improvement mindset to deliver results in one or multiple areas:

Responsibilities:

• When there are associates or specialists in your team, you will be responsible for supervising, coaching, and monitoring their performance.
• You will use metrics to guide your team to improve and deliver great performance and enhance their hard skills and soft skills.
• You will personally represent Flexport’s value proposition by leading and driving the progress of tasks and projects in your scope to contribute to operational excellence.
• Your detailed scope and responsibilities will include:
  
  

Product Improvement:

• You will work closely with internal teams in APAC Ocean Gateway Operations to have an effective process to collaborate with the Tech team.
• You can understand how the latest processes and products interact with each other and the background behind them in order to represent or facilitate the operations team in talking to the Tech team.
• You can think and communicate structurally to explain the operations process, product needs, and impact, or put together a BRD (Business Request Document) or ticket to help the Tech team understand.
• You have the team and company goals in mind and shepherd the business team to properly prioritize the product requests when facing resource constraints.
• You are able to maintain a good relationship with different relevant Tech teams and properly push the Tech team to provide resource commitment and drive product feature delivery. Know who to escalate to when it is required.
• You are sensitive and creative enough to capture opportunities to productize an operations process and initiate product improvement projects.
• You are able to work with people at different levels and different teams. You can pull people from different teams to work toward a common goal.
• You can effectively provide updates to stakeholders on key issues that may impact project completion, budget, or other results

Process Optimization:

• You will work closely with internal teams in the APAC Ocean team to cultivate a continuous process improvement mindset and support the team in identifying areas to improve with data. 
• You can understand the background behind an existing process and support the operations team to find solutions to optimize the process to drive down costs to serve and increase operational efficiency.
• You can initiate a process improvement project when you see there are opportunities and drive project development to successfully implement the change.
• You can represent or facilitate the APAC Ocean Gateway Operations team to discuss, negotiate, or align on a process design and implementation, but also can think of the overall gains.
• You can be open to listening to different parties’ input and think from an execution perspective, but also consider the company’s benefits as a whole to design an actionable and effective process.
• You can develop metrics to measure the success of a process change and establish the mechanism to monitor the trend post-launch.
• You are able to work with people at different levels and different teams. You can pull people from different teams to work toward a common goal.
• You can effectively provide updates to stakeholders on key issues that may impact project completion, budget, or other results.

What you will need:

Experience:

• BA/BS degree
• Minimum 3-5 years of experience in logistics, freight forwarding, supply chain, ocean carrier operations, or consulting
• Excellent command of both spoken and written English and Chinese/Mandarin.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Proven ability to build strong, cohesive relationships with the business, operations, technology, and other key stakeholders
• Data-driven, strong analytical and logical sense
• Strong attention to detail and proficient problem-solving skills.
• Strong sense of prioritization and ability to execute deliverables
  
  

Mindset:

We’re looking for folks who have:

• Desire to “build a better machine” and get irritated when things aren’t optimal
• Demonstrated ability to lead small teams in day-to-day execution
• Hands-on, process-oriented, structured thinking with strong problem-solving capabilities 
• Strategic vision and ground-floor execution
• Excitement to exercise your leadership skills to pull people together
• Courage to challenge the status quo when logic and reason require it. See something broken? Fix it!

• Flexibility to get the job done when needed. Willing to work outside office hours and occasional weekend or night shifts in certain locations.

Skills:

• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and organizational skills
• Good command of both spoken and written English and Chinese/Mandarin
• Optimizing processes analytically
• Building feedback loops for a product or project
• Problem-Solving 4: Building consensus among people with strongly differing opinions
• Managing time and commitments
• Generating ideas through data
• Forming hypotheses and developing experiments
• Framing problems
• Investigating and troubleshooting operations problems
• Solving problems through hypothesis-based root cause analysis

Growth and development:

Skills you can advance in this role:

• All of the above +
• Coaching your colleagues
• Encouraging your team to improve how the team works
• Helping your team learn from performance outcomes
• Inspiring your team
• Organizing, leading, and participating in meetings
• Project delivery ability
• Cross-team communication skills
• Process and metrics design skills

What you will learn:

• You will gain the skills necessary to lead a team of increasing scale and function. You will learn how to be a player-coach who apprentices team members in skill development.
• You will learn what it takes to effectively drive people from different teams but not directly report to you: holding them accountable while also creating win-win opportunities.
• You will learn how to thrive in an ambiguous environment, research and implement hypotheses, and inform the strategy of a newly built team.
• You will learn how to facilitate discussion, decision-making, and conflict resolution.