Mid/Senior Route Planning & Optimization Engineer

StartupHeroes is seeking Remote Mid/Senior Route Planning & Optimization Engineers to design and improve the optimization systems that power real-time logistics decisions for one of Turkey's largest delivery platforms. You will join our optimization team — a small group of engineers working on genuinely hard problems at the intersection of operations research, logistics, and large-scale data engineering.

We have been operating a production last-mile delivery optimization system for several years, and are now expanding into first-mile logistics: planning daily truck routes from distribution centers to stores, with full-day time horizons, multi-trip scheduling, and fleet capacity management. You will contribute to both systems.

We solve these problems using Google OR-Tools and Java, supported by MySQL, BigQuery, and Tableau. Java proficiency is strongly preferred, but candidates with solid Python backgrounds and willingness to work in a JVM environment are also welcome. We care far more about how you think through hard problems than which language you use to solve them.

StartupHeroes has a positive, diverse, and supportive culture—we look for people who are curious, inventive, and work to be a little better every single day. In our work together we aim to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, collaborative. If this sounds like a good fit for you, why not say hello?

What you will be doing:

• Design, implement, and tune VRP/CVRPTW optimization models for last-mile and first-mile logistics using Google OR-Tools in Java.
• Model and encode business constraints: time windows, vehicle capacities, product compatibility rules, dock scheduling, legal driving limits, carrier assignment rules, and more.
• Analyze large logistics datasets using MySQL, BigQuery, and Tableau to present findings, derive insights, uncover inefficiencies, validate solution quality, and drive algorithmic improvements.
• Collaborate directly with Product Managers, Logistics Specialists, and Backend/Frontend Engineers to translate operational requirements into solver constraints, objective functions, and new product features.
• Own team features or systems end-to-end — defining their long-term health while improving surrounding systems for operational excellence.
• Participate in code reviews and continuously raise engineering standards, tooling, and processes across the optimization stack.

What you should have:

• A bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Operations Research, or another quantitative field.
• 2–6 years of professional experience in software engineering or optimization, with meaningful work in algorithm design or analytical problem solving.
• Solid understanding of operations research fundamentals: combinatorial optimization, constraint programming, and vehicle routing problems (VRP, CVRPTW or variants).
• Proficiency in SQL and hands-on experience querying and analyzing large datasets.
• Strong programming skills in Java, or in Python with genuine motivation to work in a Java codebase.
• Comfort with multi-objective optimization trade-offs and iterative algorithm development.
• Clear communication skills: you can explain a constraint formulation or a solver output to a non-technical stakeholder, and can also discuss algorithmic design decisions with fellow engineers.

Nice to have:

• Hands-on experience with Google OR-Tools or another combinatorial optimization solver (CPLEX, Gurobi, or similar).
• Exposure to first-mile or outbound logistics: depot-to-store routing, Transportation Management Systems (TMS), truck fleet planning, supply chain, or e-commerce fulfillment.
• Experience designing or integrating distance/duration matrix services (OSRM, Google Maps, Yandex, or similar), including real-time or historical traffic data; familiarity with OpenStreetMap (OSM) data and OSRM graph configuration is a plus.
• Knowledge of multi-trip VRP modeling approaches or vehicle scheduling with with heuristic & meta-heuristic or hybrid approaches.

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• Familiarity with real-world trade-offs such as runtime, infeasibility handling, solution stability, and operational explainability.
• ML model development for logistics use cases — ETA prediction, service time estimation etc.
• Experience with Google BigQuery at scale and Tableau dashboard design.
• Familiarity with observability practices: structured logging, metrics, alerting.

What We Can Offer You:

• Remote work option
• Competitive salary and Bonus package
• Private health insurance
• Monthly renewed lunch fee
• Gift card
• Relocation support
• Internet fee support
• Sports&wellness membership support