About the role
Kanan Labs builds software that tells an exporter whether their shipping documents will survive contact with a customs authority — before the container sails, not after the refund is stuck.
There is an engine that produces signed, checkable rules. There is nothing yet that puts one in front of a human being about to send a container to Rotterdam. You build that.
What this job entails. Concretely: the service layer that does not exist yet; document intake that copes with an invoice photographed at an angle; extraction where every field carries its source page and confidence rather than arriving as a bare string; reconciliation that can say exactly which of three documents disagrees and where; and the reviewer console the whole product is judged on. You will often be the person who writes the specification rather than the person who receives it.
You will not be alone in the sense that matters — the architecture is opinionated and already written down, and you consume it rather than redesign it. Arguing that it should change is welcome; there is a documented process for that.
You do not need customs experience and we do not expect it. What we do expect is that you have built something end to end that another person then depended on, and that you can talk about the parts of it that went wrong.
What you’ll do
- Build the API layer between the rules engine and everything downstream.
- Build document intake and classification, where "we are not sure what this is" is a real answer rather than a crash.
- Build the extraction pipeline so every extracted field carries its source, its page and its confidence.
- Build cross-document reconciliation — invoice, packing list and bill of lading must agree, and the system must say where they do not.
- Build the packet engines and the reviewer console.
- Ship weekly, in front of real users, from early on.
What we look for
- Roughly two to six years building software other people relied on. Internships and your own projects count.
- Python and TypeScript — or clear evidence you pick up a stack in a fortnight.
- You have worked across the stack: an API, a database and a screen, all yours.
- You are comfortable integrating vendor APIs rather than rebuilding them.
- You write clearly. This company runs on written documents.
Nice to have
- Document AI or OCR — Docling, Azure Document Intelligence, Surya, Marker, Unstructured, or similar.
- Next.js, TypeScript in strict mode, Tailwind, shadcn.
- PostgreSQL beyond CRUD — migrations, constraints, query plans.
- You have worked somewhere the output had to be defended: finance, healthcare, legal, logistics.
- A public trail of things you have built. A good repository beats a good CV here and we will read it.