About the role
Kanan Labs builds software that checks an exporter's shipping documents against the rules before the container sails. That claim is worth nothing unless somebody here has personally watched it fail at a port.
That is you. You are the reason our rules are right rather than merely well-formed, the person a customer talks to when a refund has not landed, and the person a prospective design partner believes within thirty seconds because you have obviously done the job.
What this job entails. Three things. You check every rule the system encodes against what actually happens — the person who says "that condition is correct on paper and wrong at the air cargo complex." You own delivery: reviewer workflow, what a packet must contain before a broker or an underwriter will accept it, onboarding, and the customer who writes in at 9pm. And you carry the conversations with exporters who might become our first design partners.
Two things we will say plainly rather than leave you to discover. First, this pays substantially more than the same work inside a broking firm, fully declared, with equity on top — we would rather state that than play a negotiation game. Second, and following from it, this is not a role where you keep a side practice. We will ask directly, because the entire product is an argument about defensibility and we cannot make that argument with a divided book.
This is not a sales role and there is no quota. It is also not a role for someone who has supervised the work without ever having done it.
What you’ll do
- Check encoded rules against operational reality, and be the internal authority when they disagree.
- Own the delivery backbone — reviewer workflow, packet acceptance, onboarding, customer queries.
- Define what a shipping-bill or marine-insurance packet must contain before a broker or underwriter will sign it.
- Carry design-partner conversations with exporters, brokers and forwarders.
- Sit with the engineers often enough that the product is shaped by the port, not by a diagram.
What we look for
- Eight years or more in customs clearance, export documentation or freight forwarding.
- You have filed, or directly supervised the filing of, real shipping bills. Not managed a team that did — done it.
- You can explain why an IGST refund gets stuck, and whose obligation the missing step usually was.
- Tamil. This is a hard requirement — the corridor runs Chennai, Ranipet, Hosur, Krishnagiri and Coimbatore.
- You want your income fully on the books.
Nice to have
- G-card, or having sat and passed the Customs Brokers Licensing Regulation 6 examination.
- You have chosen or rolled out software at a broking firm or forwarder, or implemented it from the vendor side — Logi-Sys, Trezix, Kale, Automaxis, ODeX or similar.
- AEO application experience. Surviving a customs audit of your own internal controls is a strong signal.
- EV components, auto ancillaries, or anything that has made you argue about Chapter 85.
- Marine cargo insurance exposure, broker-side or claims-side.