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The Global Distribution and Trade Compliance Manager is on the Global Operations Team reporting to the Director of Global Distribution and Customer Care. Position will be located in Valencia, Spain

The role is responsible for global logistics and distribution of raw materials and finished goods in all regions, ensuring full compliance with international trade regulations. This role is crucial to enabling efficient, cost-effective, and compliant movement of goods across borders, and will work closely with all other supply chain and operations areas, legal, and finance teams.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and execute a global strategy and vision for logistics, warehousing, and trade compliance to serve all Apeel, third-party contracted, and customer sites that supports scalable growth while ensuring cost competitiveness
• Manage daily business demands to ensure raw material, finished goods and equipment movements support production and sales.
• Translate business strategies into actionable plans by leveraging market, functional, and institutional knowledge and data
• Develop, implement and optimize strategies to identify and embed best practices that improve all aspects of logistics, warehousing and trade compliance to ensure the company has a service and cost advantage versus our competition
• Develop and execute logistics, and warehousing procurement strategies that optimize the company’s ability to provide exceptional service to our customers at the most effective overall cost, regardless of geographical location
• Optimize overall freight network, building strong relationships with freight forwarders and strategic truck, rail, ocean, air and intermodal carriers
• Oversee and dynamically optimize overall in-house and outsourced warehousing network
• Lead the integration into new regions through research of trade requirements and provide recommendations for process changes due to new trade restrictions
• Lead product classifications and oversee third-party classification of products under the Harmonized Tariff System or the Department of Commerce
• Stay up to date with import/export regulations relevant to our supply chain, guiding the team in compliance efforts
• Establish and uphold documented procedures for all import/export processes to ensure Apeel remains compliant with evolving trade regulations
• Conduct risk-based analysis of import/export shipments for risk mitigation
• Manage relationships with customs brokers and similar third-party providers
• Ensure quality and regulatory compliance procedures and processes are adhered to across the company’s operations
• Integrate and operate key business processes within an ERP system and other relevant software platforms
• Develop and analyze internal and third party KPIs, logistic dashboards and reports, providing executive summaries and recommending corrective actions as necessary
• Anticipate organizational challenges and work collaboratively with cross-functional teams to resolve them
• Champion new processes (including automation) and/or improve organizational logistics and trade compliance acumen to remove barriers and adapt to current processes to facilitate improvements
• Mentor and develop team members, fostering a collaborative and growth-oriented environment

What You Bring

• 10+ years of hands-on and managerial experience leading all aspects of local and international logistics and trade compliance operations in a dynamic business environment
• Deep knowledge and experience of all transportation modes, domestic and international, including experience working with a diverse network of vendors
• A robust understanding of legal compliance and Incoterms,
• Strong negotiating skills in a best value, cost down environment
• Ability to interpret government regulations and ensure compliance
• Extensive experience in classifying harmonized tariff codes and ECCNs
• Experience in imports/exports
• Strong business and financial acumen
• Action-oriented, taking initiative to engage with internal and external parties directly to solve complex problems
• Highly collaborative and able to rally effort towards a common purpose
• Demonstrated organizational/planning and communication skills
• Highly adaptable and able to juggle tasks across multiple concurrent projects to accomplish objectives
• Strong attention to detail, and advanced data-driven analytical and problem-solving skills
• Ability to prioritize and meet deadlines
• Proven ability to create and implement logistics and trade compliance processes aligned with ERP methodology, as well as KPI reporting and dashboards to drive organizational performance
• Advanced experience with MS Excel and ERP systems (MRPeasy, preferred) and familiarity and comfort with other software tools (e.g., Jira, Slack)
• Willingness to travel domestically and internationally (up to 15%)
• English and Spain proficiency required