The Role

We’re hiring an Optimisation Engineer to own and evolve Jigcar’s optimisation engine — a core capability that underpins how customers plan routes, allocate drivers, load transporters, and move vehicles efficiently at scale.

This is a hands-on, product-facing engineering role, not a research position. Your work will directly shape customer workflows and operational outcomes, and you’ll collaborate closely with Product, Engineering and Operations to ensure optimisation is usable, explainable, and trusted in the real world.

If you enjoy turning messy operational reality into systems that genuinely work — and watching those systems get used every day — you’ll feel at home here.

Location: Hybrid UK or Remote either in the UK or EU

Salary: £80k - £115k DOE

What you’ll work on:

You’ll lead the design and evolution of Jigcar’s optimisation capabilities and help define how optimisation shows up across the product. This includes: You’ll own customer relationships end-to-end and help shape the foundations of Customer Success at Jigcar. This includes:

• Designing,buildingand owning the optimisation engine that powers vehicle routing,schedulingand multi-car transporter loading.
• Modelling real-world constraints such as driver availability, site opening hours, prep dependencies, transportercapacityand last-minute changes.
• Balancing solution quality with operational practicality — shipping solutions that are fast,explainable and usable, not just theoretically optimal.
• Scaling optimisation performance as volume grows, while keeping solve timesappropriate forlive operations.
• Collaborating closely with Product, Design and Software Engineers to integrate optimisation outputs into intuitive workflows.
• Working directly with operations teams and customers to understand how planningactually happensand where optimisation creates real value.
• Experimenting with and introducing improvements — new constraint models, heuristics, solvertechniquesor ML-augmented approaches — where they meaningfully improve outcomes.
• Contributing to internal documentation, modelling standards and technical playbooks as the optimisation function matures.

Who you’ll work with:

• Enginerring on optimisation architecture, performance and system design
• James (Transport Director) on real-world operational contect and constraint modelling
• Rupert (CPO) on product direction, UX and prioritisation
• Elliott (CEO) on commercial positioning and ensuring everything is grounded in real ROI
• Product & Design to ensure optimisation is understandable and actionable
• Customer and Ops Teams to validate assumptions and iterate based on reality

What we’re looking for

What You’ll Bring

• Strong foundations in optimisation techniques such as constraint programming, mixed-integer programming, metaheuristics or related approaches.
• Experience applying optimisation to real-world scheduling,routingor planning problems — beyond purely academic settings.
• A pragmatic mindset: you know when “good enough now” beats “perfect too late”.
• Comfort working with imperfect data, evolvingrequirementsand operational edge cases.
• The ability to explain optimisation trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• A product mindset: you care about usability,trustand adoption as much as solution quality.
• A builder’s attitude: you enjoy ambiguity, ownership and shaping systems fromearly stages.

Technical Environment

• Our optimisation engine runs on the JVM (Kotlin) and is deployed on AWS (serverless).
• Experience withTimefold/OptaPlanner or similar solver frameworks is a strong plus.
• Prior Kotlin experience is helpful but notrequired— JVM experience and strong modelling skills matter more.
• Bonus points for:
• Experience inlogistics, transport, automotive or operations-heavy environments.
• Exposure to large-scale or near-real-time optimisation systems.
• Interest in combining optimisation with AI / ML techniques pragmatically.
• Experience working closely with product teams or end users.

How you work

You’ll thrive at Jigcar if you:

• Enjoy joining a company early and shaping how core systems evolve.
• Like moving between discovery, modelling,implementationand iteration.
• Communicate clearly and enjoy collaborating across disciplines.
• Are comfortable speaking directly with customers and operations teams.
• Thinkbig, butexecute simply and pragmatically.
• Care more about outcomes than ego.

This role might not be right for you if…

• You prefer purely theoretical or research-led optimisation work.
• You want narrow responsibilities with minimal product or user interaction.
• You’reuncomfortable with ambiguity or changing constraints.
• You prefer long planning cycles over fast iteration and learning.

What we can offer you

• Competitive salary (DOE) and meaningful equity from day one
• High-spec MacBook and quality equipment
• Discretionary performance-driven bonuses
• Real ownership of a core, differentiating system
• The chance to help build a category-defining, AI-first product
• 28 days holiday + your birthday off

Our commitment to diversity

The automotive industry has historically lacked diversity and balanced gender representation, and we want to help change that. At Jigcar, we’re committed to building a team where people of all backgrounds feel welcome, supported and able to thrive. We actively encourage applications from underrepresented groups - your lived experience and perspectives will make us stronger.

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