Senior Backend Engineer Amsterdam Distributed Systems

Your role: Senior Backend Engineer Amsterdam Distributed Systems

• Do you enjoy building globally 24/7 used backend systems where reliability, correctness and scalability genuinely matter?
• Would you like to keep building hands-on, while gradually growing into tech lead, within a medium sized very successful paytech unicorn to be where you can still have long lasting impact?
• Do you enjoy working with very intelligent and friendly backend engineers from over 30 countries who challenge each other, care about production quality and take ownership seriously?
• And do you say yes to €20.000 in stock options, an indefinite contract from day one and a clear path towards Lead Backend Engineer?

Then this role is likely worth your attention.

Your employer: modern payment infrastructure where what you build still matters

Every day, billions in payment volume move through systems most people never think about, the life veins of the world. For consumers and merchants, payments should feel instant and effortless. Behind the scenes, every transaction depends on infrastructure that needs to be available, correct, observable and resilient, 24/7.

Your future employer is an Amsterdam-based fintech scale-up building modern, cloud-native payment infrastructure for this world. Not another checkout widget or simple payment-provider integration, but core infrastructure that helps major payment companies process transactions faster, more reliably and with far more flexibility than legacy systems allow.

That is what makes this company interesting for strong backend engineers. The product is technical at its core. What you build directly affects reliability, scalability, customer trust and the ability of the company to compete in one of the largest software markets in the world.

The company is mature enough to have serious customers, global relevance and complex production systems, but still small enough that you can know people by name, influence decisions and see the effect of your work.

You are not joining a giant enterprise where your work disappears into layers of process. You are joining a high-calibre engineering environment where ownership is expected, strong opinions are welcome when backed by reasoning, and engineers are trusted to improve both the platform and the way teams operate.

The company prefers to grow future technical leaders from within. Engineers who show ownership, sound judgement, clear communication and the ability to raise the level around them can gradually take on more influence over technical direction, mentoring and team development.

Your job: Senior Backend Engineer Amsterdam Distributed Systems

As Senior Backend Engineer Amsterdam Distributed Systems, you will work in one of the stronger engineering cultures in the Dutch fintech market. Your colleagues are sharp, low-ego, emotionally intelligent and comfortable reasoning from strong CS fundamentals and first principles.

You will join a compact, product-minded backend team where you work closely with the business to build and operate backend systems at the heart of a modern payment platform. You will own services throughout their lifecycle: design, implementation, deployment, monitoring, incident response and continuous improvement in production.

This is software where almost correct is not good enough. Availability, observability, reliability and correctness are daily engineering concerns, because the systems support transaction-heavy infrastructure with real production impact.

You will work on distributed backend systems where production behaviour matters. What happens when a dependency fails? When an event arrives twice? When a retry is unsafe? When state becomes incorrect? How do you detect, recover and scale without introducing hidden fragility?

These are the kinds of problems you will help solve.

Your impact will not stop at the services you personally build. As the company grows, you can take on more responsibility for technical direction, mentoring, engineering standards and architectural decisions. For someone who enjoys both hands-on engineering and helping others become better, this creates a clear path towards Lead Engineer or even Team Lead responsibilities.

What is required

• 7+ years of experience as a Backend Software Engineer
• Experience designing, building and operating production systems, with the battle scars to prove it
• Experience with distributed systems, asynchronous processing or event-driven architecture
• Strong CS fundamentals and first-principles thinking
• Ability to clearly explain your technical reasoning, trade-offs and decision-making process
• A completed technical MSc is highly preferred
• Experience with business-critical systems where downtime, incorrect state or unreliable behaviour had real impact
• Experience with cloud-native environments, preferably AWS
• Strong understanding of reliability, observability, testing and scalability
• Strong communication skills: you can make complex systems understandable without hiding behind jargon
• High emotional intelligence: low ego, open to feedback, able to challenge and be challenged constructively
• Interest in mentoring engineers and helping teams improve
• Experience in payments, fintech, banking, billing, checkout, trading, marketplaces or other transaction-heavy domains is highly valuable, but not required. What matters most is that you have worked on systems where correctness and production ownership genuinely mattered.

What is offered

• Salary between €85.000 and €100.000, depending on experience
• €20.000 in stock options
• Indefinite contract from day one
• Realistic growth path towards Lead Engineer or Team Lead
• High-calibre engineering environment with strong peers
• Modern AWS-based platform
• 25 holidays
• Flexible working hours
• Hybrid working environment
• Travel expense reimbursement
• Excellent pension
• Laptop or MacBook
• Modern office in Amsterdam
• Free parking options
• International engineering organisation with more than 30 nationalities

Would you like to keep building mission-critical backend systems while growing your technical influence within one of the most ambitious fintech scale-ups in Europe?