Senior Backend Engineer Amsterdam

Your role: Senior Backend Engineer Amsterdam

• Do you enjoy owning mission-critical systems where reliability, correctness and scalability genuinely matter?
• Would you like to continue building software while gradually taking on more responsibility for technical direction, mentoring and team development?
• Do you enjoy working alongside highly capable engineers who challenge each other to improve every day?
• And do you say yes to €20.000 in stock options, an indefinite contract from day one and a realistic path towards Lead Engineer or Team Lead responsibilities?

Then this role is very likely worth your attention.

Your employer: helping modernise one of the world's largest software markets

Every day, billions of payments move through infrastructure that was often designed decades ago. While consumers and businesses expect payments to become faster, simpler and more flexible, much of the technology behind the scenes remains complex, expensive and difficult to change.

Rather than accepting this reality, your future employer decided to rebuild payment processing from the ground up using modern cloud-native technology.

Today, that decision is paying off.

The company has grown into one of the most technically ambitious fintech companies in Europe, processing transactions for increasingly large international customers while continuing to expand across new markets. What makes the business particularly interesting is that engineering sits at the centre of its competitive advantage. Technology decisions directly influence the company's ability to win customers, launch new capabilities and challenge long-established incumbents.

As an engineer, you're not joining an organisation where technology simply supports the business. You're joining an organisation where technology is the business.

The engineering culture reflects that reality. Ownership is expected. Reliability matters. Strong opinions are encouraged when backed by thoughtful reasoning. Engineers are trusted to make decisions, challenge assumptions and continuously improve both the platform and the way teams operate.

The company currently brings together engineers from more than thirty nationalities and has deliberately created an environment where talented people can learn from one another while working on genuinely difficult technical problems.

Perhaps most importantly, the company prefers to develop future technical leaders from within. Rather than constantly hiring leadership from the outside, engineers who consistently demonstrate ownership, sound judgement and the ability to elevate those around them are given increasing influence over technical direction, mentoring and team development.

For ambitious senior engineers, that creates a unique opportunity. Not only can you help build the platform, you can help shape the engineering organisation behind it.

Your job: Senior Backend Engineer Amsterdam

As a Senior Backend Engineer Amsterdam, you'll help build and operate the systems that form the core of the platform. You'll work on software where availability, reliability and correctness are daily engineering concerns rather than architectural buzzwords.

The systems you help build process billions of euros in transaction volume every year, which means every technical decision has consequences.

• How do you ensure systems remain available when dependencies fail?
• How do you prevent duplicate processing?
• How do you improve observability?
• How do you scale safely as transaction volumes continue to grow?

These are the kinds of problems you'll help solve.

You'll get ownership of services throughout their entire lifecycle, from design and implementation to deployment, monitoring and continuous improvement in production. You'll work closely with highly experienced engineers who have built and operated large-scale systems before, giving you the opportunity to further sharpen your own engineering judgement while contributing your experience to the team.

What makes this role particularly attractive for many senior engineers is that your impact won't stop at the systems you build. As the company grows, you'll increasingly contribute to mentoring engineers, improving engineering standards and influencing technical decisions that affect multiple teams. For engineers who enjoy helping others improve, there is a clear path towards Lead Engineer or Team Lead responsibilities over time.

Not by moving away from engineering. But by combining technical excellence with leadership.

What is required?

• 5+ years of experience as a Backend Software Engineer
• Experience designing, building and operating production systems
• Experience with distributed systems, asynchronous processing or event-driven architectures
• Experience owning services throughout their lifecycle
• Experience operating business-critical systems in production
• Experience with production incidents, operational responsibility or on-call environments
• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, Java, Kotlin, Go or similar backend technologies
• Experience working in cloud-native environments, preferably AWS
• Strong understanding of reliability, observability, testing and scalability
• Strong communication skills
• A collaborative, low-ego mindset
• Genuine interest in mentoring engineers and helping teams improve

Nice to have, but not required:

• Experience in payments is valuable, but not required. What matters most is that you have operated systems where failure, inconsistency or downtime had real business impact.
• Experience operating high-availability systems at scale
• Experience mentoring engineers
• Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams

What is offered?

• Salary between €85.000 and €100.000 depending on experience
• €20.000 in stock options
• An indefinite contract from day one!
• A realistic growth path towards Lead Engineer or Team Lead responsibilities
• The opportunity to help shape both the platform and the future engineering organisation behind it
• Direct access to highly experienced engineers and technical leaders
• Structured feedback and active mentorship
• 25 holidays
• Flexible working hours
• Hybrid working environment
• Travel expense reimbursement
• Excellent pension
• Laptop or MacBook
• Modern office environment
• Free parking options
• An international engineering organisation with more than 30 nationalities
• A high-performance engineering culture focused on ownership, reliability and continuous improvement

Would you like to continue building mission-critical distributed systems while gradually growing into a broader technical leadership role within one of Europe's most ambitious fintech scale-ups?