Software Engineer - VMS

Senior Software Engineer

Our Tech Stack: https://stackshare.io/companies/sedna

 

About Sedna:

Sedna is at the forefront of revolutionising the operating system for shipping. Our AI-powered platform is designed to make global trade more efficient, transparent, and sustainable. As we continue to grow and innovate, we are looking for exceptional talent to join our journey and contribute to our mission of transforming the shipping industry .

You can find out more about us on our website: https://sedna.com/

About the role

This role focuses on contributing to the design, development, and evolution of Sedna’s VMS (Voyage Management System). It's a mature, highly specialised platform that shipowners, operators and charterers use to run chartering, voyage operations, cargo and freight/hire invoicing. 

VMS has a Java backend exposing a REST API used by our own web client (React) and directly by customers' integrations. Data lives in Oracle, including a significant amount of business logic in PL/SQL. It runs on AWS and builds through GitLab CI/CD.

Sedna VMS is in use 24/7 by shipping companies worldwide. Customers run their daily operations and invoicing on it, so correctness, performance and reliability directly affect their business.

You will play a key part in raising standards and delivering new features. You'll take real ownership of features and of how they behave in production, on a product customers run their business on, and help shape how the platform evolves. You'll work with modern AI-assisted development tools as part of everyday engineering.

How you’ll make an impact

Engineering and feature development

This role contributes to both backend and frontend development. Day-to-day responsibilities include understanding requirements, shaping technical approaches, writing code, and contributing to automated tests. Development work spans a mix of new features, improvements, and maintenance, driven by both customer and product needs.

System architecture and modernisation

The role includes participating in ongoing efforts to refine and modernise the platform. This involves contributing to technical upgrade work, improving system structure, and supporting longer-term architectural direction as the product grows. Opportunities exist to participate in design discussions and help shape solutions that improve system performance, reliability, and extensibility.

Quality, testing, and delivery practices

The team maintains a focus on software quality. We combine unit tests, API regression tests (Postman) and UI tests (Playwright) with peer code review on every merge request. Releases are built and tested through GitLab CI/CD. We're actively improving here: getting more of our test suites running automatically in CI and making them reliable. Engineers who want to drive that, will have room to do it.

Collaboration with product and customer-facing teams

The role involves close collaboration with product managers through refinement, planning, and solution discussions. Engineers also interact with Customer Support on cases that need engineering input, and, for larger projects, join customer conversations to validate technical approaches.

Continuous improvement and documentation

We treat documentation, including API references, design decisions and runbooks, as part of delivering a change. Much of VMS's knowledge still sits with experienced team members, and capturing it in written, searchable form is an active priority. We also reserve time for technical debt and internal improvements.

In your first 90 days, you can expect

• Month 1: Build your understanding of Sedna’s architecture and our products. Get set up with the VMS codebase, your dev environment and the release process, and ship your first changes. Meet your team, product manager and key customer-facing colleagues. Learn the maritime workflows our customers depend on. 
• Month 2: Take ownership of a well-scoped piece of work from refinement with product through to release. Contribute to design discussions, give timely and constructive code review feedback. Shadow the on-call rotation and get familiar with runbooks and production tooling.
• Month 3: Lead the technical approach on a complex feature or improvement within your team, working independently and raising risks and dependencies early. Join the on-call rotation. Contribute improvements to tests, runbooks or documentation based on what you found hard to learn, and support technical validation in a customer conversation where relevant.

What we're looking for:

Essential experience

Candidates typically bring three+ years of professional engineering experience from a comparable environment. Experience working on production systems where quality and reliability are important. Familiarity with a JVM language (Java, Kotlin, Scala) or a similar backend language, React or another modern frontend framework. Strong SQL and relational database skills, ideally Oracle or PostgreSQL, including query performance. Experience supporting production systems: diagnosing incidents from logs and metrics. Prior on-call experience is a plus.

Critical skills

A strong grasp of building and maintaining features within a larger system is helpful. Confidence with automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and code review workflows is expected. Clear thinking, good problem-solving ability, and the capacity to work with domain-heavy logic contribute to success in the role. Experience with enterprise or workflow-driven applications is an advantage.

Traits and mindset

Curiosity and a willingness to learn the maritime domain are appreciated. A collaborative working style, comfort sharing ideas in cross-functional settings, and the ability to work independently when needed all support strong performance. Adaptability is important as the product and architecture continue to evolve.

Core competencies

Systems thinking, ownership of outcomes, strong communication skills, and effective collaboration are central to this role. A motivation to create value for customers and contribute to a stable, evolving platform is essential.

What’s In Store for You

• A strong team. You’ll join a global team of senior and staff engineers who set a high bar and will help level you up.
• A generous salary and benefits package (depending on experience) + private medical, equity, health and wellbeing benefits, home internet contribution
• Scalability challenges. You’ll be a part of evolving our VMS system as we further develop in to a product led company.
• Customer impact. Real customers use our products everyday, you'll see your work impacting real people.
• Collaboration & autonomy. Plenty of heads-down technical work, but also close partnership with product engineers and engineering leadership.

Our Values:

Finally, culture is important to us, so we also look for candidates who share our values:

Stay Ahead, Stay Agile

• We don’t just adapt-we anticipate change and act with confidence.
• Curiosity, data, and customer insights help us stay ahead of the curve.
• We embrace challenges as opportunities and remain resilient under pressure.
• By staying open to new ideas and ways of working, we lead the future.

Execute With Focus

• We turn strategy into action, delivering measurable results that matter.
• Every initiative counts-discipline and ownership drive business impact.
• We make smart decisions with speed, balancing pace and precision.
• Clear priorities keep us focused on what moves the needle.

Work Together, Win Together

• Collaboration is our superpower-we succeed as one team, internally and with customers.
• We co-create solutions, seek feedback, and build the future of Sedna together.
• Strong relationships are built on trust, respect, and shared goals. 
• By aligning across teams and with customers, we unlock greater impact.