You understand how customs and border authorities actually work. You’ve spent 8+ years at the intersection of trade, customs enforcement, or border security technology — understanding the operational constraints, the data limitations, and the political realities from the inside. You know the difference between a manifest and an entry summary. You’ve seen how targeting and clearance decisions get made, and you understand why the systems that support them weren’t built for what’s being asked of them today.
You think in networks, not transactions. You understand that trade is inherently a network system — and that the most consequential risks (evasion, illicit finance, undervaluation, COO laundering, supply chain manipulation) hide in the connections, not the individual records. You’re energized by graph-based analytics, AI-driven pattern detection, and the opportunity to give border officers a view of global commerce that’s never existed before.
You can hold policy and product in your head at the same time. You’ve translated high-level mandates — forced labor enforcement, counternarcotics, trusted-trader modernization, revenue protection — into concrete product features. You know how to write a requirement an engineer can build, and how to explain a data architecture to a customs official who has never written a line of code.
You build for many authorities, not one. You’re comfortable designing for agencies across developed and emerging economies — with different legal regimes, data-sovereignty requirements, languages, and levels of digital maturity — and finding the common platform beneath the local variation.
You lead teams that build, not just describe. Your team defines system interfaces, drafts API specs, and prototypes workflows before production code is written. You hold yourself and your team to shipping things that work in the real world.
You’re tech-enabled and obsessed with UX. You understand the plumbing — APIs, EDI, ETL/ELT, JSON — but you’re equally obsessed with the user experience. You hate clunky integration projects. You believe that even the most complex border workflows can be made to feel like magic with the right product thinking.
Clearance is a plus, but not required. Some of our government work requires eligibility for a security clearance; eligibility for (or an existing) U.S. security clearance, or a prior successful Customs and Border Protection/DHS background investigation, is a strong plus. For engagements with international customs authorities, relevant local eligibility and the ability to work within each authority’s security requirements is what matters most.