Backend Engineer

The opportunity: Backend Engineer

As a Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for developing and maintaining the platform infrastructure that powers our products. You will work closely with our Frontend Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and other stakeholders to design and build scalable, reliable, and high-performance products.

Given that most of our team is located in the Netherlands, we only consider candidates for this position who live within commuting distance to our office in Amsterdam.

What you'll do in this role

• Design and implement scalable and reliable backend systems and infrastructure to support our products
• Develop and maintain our micro-services to expose platform functionality to internal and external clients
• Collaborate with development and quality assurance teams to ensure high availability, scalability, and security of our systems
• Collaborate with DevOps Engineers to ensure the continuous delivery and deployment of software products
• Work with software developers to identify and implement improvements to our platform architecture and functionality
• Develop and maintain documentation of our systems and processes
• Mentor and train junior members of the backend team
• Keep up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies

What you bring to the table

• Proficiency in Python programming language
• 3+ years of experience in the related field
• Experience with relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle
• Experience with the cloud platforms (AWS, Azure or GCP)
• Experience with containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to work independently and as part of a team
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work with stakeholders across the organization
• Excellent English communication skills

What success in the first 6 months looks like

• You’ve built trust with Product, Frontend, and DevOps peers and taken clear ownership of 2-3 domain APIs/services, including stewardship of their contracts and SLAs.
• You’ve established an API-first workflow: starting from use cases, you propose and socialize OpenAPI specs, align on naming and conventions, then implement in FastAPI with Pydantic models.
• You’ve delivered impactful API features end-to-end (design → implementation → tests → docs) that are consumed by internal and external clients without hand-holding.
• You’ve raised API robustness: strong request/response validation, consistent error models, pagination and idempotency where appropriate, and backward-compatible versioning enforced via automated contract tests in CI (ruff, Poetry, pre-commit).
• You’ve improved the reliability and performance of our service by adding meaningful observability (metrics, logs, tracing) and defining SLIs/SLOs for key endpoints—reducing 5xx rates and improving p95 latency.
• You’ve made safe database changes in MySQL with SQLAlchemy migrations, optimized critical queries, and contributed to data access patterns involving DynamoDB or Neo4j while keeping API contracts stable.
• You’ve strengthened the security of APIs (authN/authZ boundaries, scoped tokens, least-privilege access, secrets management, rate limiting) and documented the approach.
• You’ve written clear API documentation and examples (e.g., snippets/collections), shared knowledge with the team, and mentored junior engineers so others can build on your work.

Current tech stack

We are fully cloud-native, leveraging AWS and adopting a Lean, API-first product development approach driven by modern cloud technologies and thoughtful design practices.

Our backend applications are built using Python, FastAPI, Pydantic, and SQLAlchemy (MySQL). On the front end, we predominantly develop with Angular and also utilize Headless Wagtail and WordPress for select products. To ensure code quality and a consistent release pipeline, we employ GitHub Actions for CI/CD along with tools like Renovate, ruff, Poetry, and pre-commit.

We containerize our applications using Docker and Docker Compose. Currently, we are transitioning from AWS Lambda-based deployments to Kubernetes-managed services and moving from AWS CloudFormation to Terraform for infrastructure as code. We continue to expand our capabilities in knowledge graphs (Neo4j) and database technologies (MySQL, DynamoDB).