Case Study - RXO Matches Loads to Capacity in Near Real Time on a Ground-Up Event-Streaming Platform
I greatly appreciated their ability to effectively and independently manage our development team. With Aligned in charge, I always had confidence that we were making progress and working on the right thing.
RXO is one of the largest tech-enabled brokered freight transportation providers in North America, connecting shippers with carrier capacity at national scale. The economics of that business turn on a single question, asked constantly: which available truck should carry which load, right now.
The Situation
Matching freight to capacity is the core of a brokerage, and doing it quickly and well is what separates a covered load at a healthy margin from a missed one. RXO needed that matching to happen in near real time and at scale, faster and more consistently than manual and batch-oriented workflows could sustain as volume grew. That meant a new, purpose-built platform component, designed and built from the ground up rather than bolted onto existing systems, and a team that could deliver it without disrupting day-to-day operations.
Our Approach
Aligned embedded with RXO and spearheaded the solution design for this key platform component, then built it from the ground up. We architected an event-driven system on .NET and Apache Kafka, using Kafka Streams to process load and capacity signals as they arrived and surface matches in near real time, giving the business a streaming foundation it could extend as new signals and rules emerged rather than a fixed, brittle batch job. Alongside the architecture, Aligned managed the development team through delivery, keeping the work focused on the highest-value problems and moving steadily toward production.
Value Delivered
RXO gained a production, near-real-time matching capability where there had been manual and batch-bound workflows, built on an event-streaming architecture designed to scale with freight volume and to absorb new matching signals over time. Just as important, the team delivered it predictably: leadership had consistent confidence that the work was on track and aimed at the right problems, and RXO came away with a foundational component it owned and could keep building on.
- Platform Architecture
- Event-Driven Architecture
- Near-Real-Time Matching
- Embedded Delivery Leadership