cover_letter / art_0OPpf95S25k

Dear Flexport Hiring Team, Flexport sits at the intersection of a $10T industry and a genuine infrastructure problem — the kind of problem where better software doesn't just improve margins, it determines whether goods reach shelves, whether businesses survive disruptions, and whether global trade becomes more accessible to companies of every size. That mission resonates with me directly: my work at Intuit scaling a developer platform to 675M+ engagements taught me that the most consequential product work happens at the infrastructure layer, where the decisions you make ripple across dozens of teams and millions of end users simultaneously. **Technical and Analytical Foundation** My product work has always been grounded in data and engineering depth. At Intuit, I worked directly with SQL and BigQuery to surface developer pain points across approximately 20 mobile apps and 30+ product SKUs — not delegating the analysis, but building the queries myself to understand where friction lived in the platform. That data-driven approach informed the roadmap for ICE, the developer framework platform I owned, and drove 275% YoY engagement growth, scaling throughput from 6K to 50K TPS via an rSocket migration that supported approximately 1.5M concurrent connections at sub-25ms TP99. These weren't incremental improvements — they required making clear trade-off recommendations to senior leadership about where to invest and why, then executing against those decisions across multiple engineering teams. At Splunk, I owned three distinct microservice domains simultaneously — Search Service (Go), Search Catalog (PostgreSQL), and Splunk Processing Language — and built a repeatable RICE-based prioritization framework to manage competing demands from internal partners, third-party developers, and Fortune 500 customers. I delivered the Scheduler Service end-to-end in approximately four months, and led a query performance optimization initiative that achieved up to 10x improvements for a beta customer. Complex, data-dense environments with multi-step user workflows are where I've done my best work. On the technical side, I hold a BS in Computational Engineering Science from UC Berkeley and have published at NeurIPS on neural network architectures. I've built production ML platforms in PyTorch, implemented 12 reinforcement learning algorithms in a post-training workbench that benchmarks across TRL, VeRL, OpenRLHF, and NeMo RL, and architected RAG retrieval pipelines with multi-provider LLM orchestration. This depth matters for a role at Flexport not because the job is ML engineering, but because it means I can engage credibly with engineering teams on the hardest technical trade-offs, write precise specs, and build metrics frameworks that connect product behavior to business outcomes. **Why This Role** Flexport's platform spans booking, pricing, visibility, customs, and delivery — a multi-stage workflow serving logistics managers, supply chain leaders, and freight operators who have zero tolerance for ambiguity or dropped handoffs. That is exactly the kind of domain-level product challenge I find most compelling: not owning a single feature, but defining how multiple surfaces work together to deliver a coherent experience across a complex operational workflow. The Staff PM role here asks for someone who can operate at the strategy level and the execution level in the same week — that describes how I've worked throughout my career. **Role-Specific Connection** What specifically draws me to this role is the combination of domain ownership, cross-functional coordination, and the expectation that the PM builds metrics frameworks rather than simply consuming dashboards. At Intuit, I built Asterias, a declarative asset lifecycle management platform with a GraphQL API, specifically because the existing tooling couldn't give us the usage visibility we needed to make investment decisions — that instinct to build the instrumentation when it doesn't exist is something I'd bring directly to Flexport's data-rich environment. The opportunity to mentor other PMs and raise the bar on how the team writes specs, prioritizes, and communicates trade-offs is also something I take seriously; I've taught Java, cloud computing, and data analytics as adjunct faculty at De Anza College for seven years, and that experience has sharpened how I explain complex systems to different audiences. **Selected Relevant Experience** - **Intuit — ICE Platform Domain Ownership:** Owned end-to-end roadmap for ICE developer framework across multiple engineering teams; scaled to 675M+ engagements in FY23, 275% YoY growth, with throughput scaling from 6K to 50K TPS supporting ~1.5M concurrent connections at sub-25ms TP99. - **Intuit — Developer Onboarding Transformation:** Delivered ICE Self-Service platform (DevPortal, GitOps config, ICE Playground), reducing developer onboarding from 2–3 weeks to minutes in pre-prod and under 24 hours for production, while mitigating $1M+ in projected opex growth. - **Intuit — Data-Driven Prioritization:** Used SQL and BigQuery to analyze developer pain points across ~20 mobile apps and 30+ product SKUs; conducted enterprise-wide Service Language Assessment across 9 languages with findings presented to the CTO. - **Intuit — Cross-Functional Migration Leadership:** Led Mailchimp GCP-to-AWS migration for MSaaS, coordinating across engineering, DevPortal documentation, and production deadline requirements across organizational boundaries. - **Splunk — Multi-Domain Microservice Ownership:** Owned Search Service, Search Catalog, and SPL simultaneously; built RICE-based prioritization framework balancing internal, third-party, and Fortune 500 customer requirements across three microservice backlogs. - **Splunk — End-to-End Delivery in Complex Domain:** Delivered Scheduler Service from zero to production in approximately four months; led query performance optimization achieving up to 10x improvements for a beta customer in a data-dense search environment. - **Kaiser Permanente — Platform Infrastructure at Scale:** Led Splunk Logging-as-a-Service rollout to 200+ internal enterprise customers at 1.7 TB daily volume; built Redis-based caching capability addressing scalability, fault tolerance, and data redundancy across the enterprise. - **Intuit — Revenue-Generating Feature Execution:** Implemented ICE Presence in async chat, generating $480K/month in additional invoicing; deployed Background-to-Foreground Messaging on iOS/Android with under 100ms latency. **Closing** Flexport's mission — making global commerce so easy there will be more of it — is one I'd be proud to work toward. The problems here are real, the scale is significant, and the platform work is the kind that compounds: better tooling for logistics operators means better outcomes for the businesses they serve and the supply chains the world depends on. I'd welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background in platform infrastructure, data-driven product strategy, and cross-functional domain ownership maps to what Flexport needs at the Staff PM level. Thank you for your consideration. **O. Felix Amoruwa** famoruwa@berkeley.edu | 909-731-9011 | felixamoruwa.info