Backend Engineer Amsterdam

Do you want to build backend systems where reliability, correctness and scale actually matter?

Have you already carried your own code in production, where almost-correct hurt: retries, duplicate events, incorrect state, incidents?

Do you work well with sharp, low-ego backend colleagues from more than 30 countries, who care about production quality and take ownership seriously?

And do you say yes to €20.000 in stock, an indefinite contract from day one, and a salary up to €85.000?

Then this role is likely worth your attention.

Your employer: payment infrastructure where what you build still matters

Every day, payments should feel instant. Behind that sits infrastructure that has to be available, correct and resilient, 24/7.

Your future employer is an Amsterdam fintech scale-up building modern payment infrastructure. Not another checkout form or provider integration. Core infrastructure that helps payment companies move money faster, more reliably, and with more flexibility than the old rails allow.

The product is technical at its core. What you ship shows up in reliability, customer trust, and whether the platform can compete.

The company is far enough along to have serious customers and real production systems. Still small enough that you know people by name, and you can see the effect of your work.

You are not joining a large enterprise where your code disappears into process. You are joining a team that expects ownership, likes opinions when they come with reasoning, and lets you improve both the platform and how the team operates.

Your job: Mid-level Backend Software Engineer Amsterdam

You get the chance to join a compact, product-minded backend team and own the code you write. Design it, build it, put it live, watch it in production, learn from what happens next.

This is software where "almost correct" is not good enough. Availability, observability and correctness are daily concerns, because the systems sit under transaction-heavy infrastructure.

You will grow deeper into distributed backend work where production behaviour matters. What happens when a dependency fails. When an event arrives twice. When a retry is unsafe. When state drifts. You have already felt that pain in production. You do not need to have solved every one of these. You do need the scars from operating services where failure had real impact, and the appetite to go deeper with people who have gone further.

At this mid-level, strong CS fundamentals and first-principles reasoning count more than years in the seat.

Payments is the environment. You do not need a payments CV. You do need production ownership, the scars that come with it, and the appetite to go deeper.

What is required

• Completed technical MSc in Computer Science or equivalent (Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, Mathematics, Physics or similar)
• Strong CS fundamentals and first-principles reasoning
• 2 to 6 years of experience as a backend engineer
• Experience operating backend services in production where failure, incorrect state or unreliable behaviour had real impact (on-call, incidents, or financial/customer-facing correctness)
• Exposure to retries, duplicate processing or recovery is expected, even if you are still deepening it
• Exposure to distributed systems, async processing or event-driven work, even if you are still growing into it
• Clear communication: you can explain your reasoning without hiding behind jargon
• Low ego: open to feedback, able to challenge and be challenged
• Interest in being mentored, and in raising your own bar
• Experience in payments, fintech, banking, billing, trading or other transaction-heavy domains is valuable, not required. What matters is that correctness and production ownership already meant something in your work.

What is offered

• Salary between €65.000 and €85.000, depending on experience
• €20.000 in stock options
• Indefinite contract from day one
• Mentorship from senior backend colleagues, and room to deepen into distributed systems and payment infrastructure
• 25 holidays
• Flexible hours
• Hybrid, with regular days in the Amsterdam office
• Travel expense reimbursement
• Strong pension
• Laptop or MacBook
• Modern office in Amsterdam
• Free parking
• International team, more than 30 nationalities
• Working language: English

Would you like to own your code in production, inside payment infrastructure where correctness is the actual work?