Engineering at Convoy

Welcome to the Convoy tech blog! I’m excited to share more detail about the things we’re working on with a broader audience. With the exception of this post, nearly all of the content here will be posted by Convoy’s amazing data scientists, designers, engineers, and product managers. Hopefully these posts will convey a sense of both the people behind them and what it’s like to work on hard problems here at Convoy.

And there’s no shortage of hard, interesting problems to solve. Despite the massive scale of commercial trucking — roughly $800 billion annually — trucking is a highly fragmented and inefficient industry driven by decades-old technology and manual process — phone calls, emails, even faxes. Convoy is employing cutting edge data science, statistics, machine learning, design, and engineering to connect shippers (people who pay to have freight moved) and carriers (the trucking companies doing the moving) faster and more efficiently than was previously possible.

The impact of that speed and efficiency is hard to overstate. At any given time, trucks on the road are empty 40% of the time. If we can reduce that inefficiency by just 1%, then we can save $6B in freight spend, 100M driver hours, and 380M gallons of diesel per year. Those savings not only directly impact our customers’ bottom lines, but the environment as well — burning those 380M gallons of diesel would produce 8.5B pounds of CO2, the same as burning nearly 1.5M tons of coal!

Hopefully some of the things we write about here will be useful and interesting. And if you discover that you get fired up about solving the logistics problems of the 21st century like we do, we’re hiring!