Senior Backend Engineer | Cybersecurity / AI

Amsterdam | 90k - 100k | Permanent

Networking. Hacking. Streaming.

If you’re a strong backend engineer with hands-on experience in at least two of those three, I’d like a conversation.

I’m working with a cybersecurity business where that combination will get put to proper use. There’s quite a bit I can tell you about what they’re building, but some of the more interesting detail is better saved for a call.

What I can say: there are substantial volumes of data, thousands of things happening concurrently and systems that need to work out what to do next based on what they’ve just found.

Making all of that work reliably is where you come in 🤞🏻

The work

You’ll build backend services and tooling, working closely with engineers and security specialists to turn complex ideas into working software.

Some days that means building a new capability. Others, working out why a database is struggling under load, where a pipeline is getting held up or how to stop one failed task causing a much bigger headache.

You’ll be involved in:

• High-concurrency services and tools, where performance matters.
• Event-driven systems and streaming pipelines, processing information at scale.
• APIs and backend services that other parts of the platform depend on.
• AI-driven workflows involving multiple steps, decisions and things that can go wrong.
• Architecture and database improvements, with ownership of getting them into production.

They want someone who’ll have an opinion. Spot something that could work better? Bring it up. Got an idea worth testing? Be prepared to get stuck in and see it through.

The person

You’ve built and operated distributed systems, you’re a strong developer in Go, C# or a similar language, and you can talk through the decisions you made when things got complicated.

Then there’s the two-out-of-three bit:

• Networking: you understand protocols, connections and how systems communicate beneath the application layer.
• Hacking: you’ve investigated vulnerabilities, tested how systems can be exploited or built security tooling.
• Streaming: you’ve built systems that continuously process data or events, and dealt with the challenges that come with scale.

At least two is a requirement. All three would be very interesting.

I’d also like to hear about your experience with concurrency, asynchronous processing and relational databases. Python, Kafka, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL performance or autonomous agents would give us more to talk about.

And if you’ve built your own tools, contributed to open source or disappeared down a technical rabbit hole because you needed to know how something worked, tell me about it. That stuff is useful here.

What’s in it for you?

Proper ownership, a technically demanding product and the chance to work closely with people who know their security.

There’s room to influence how things are built and grow towards Staff Engineering or Engineering Management, depending on where you want to take it.

Equity, hybrid working in Amsterdam and loads of flexibility. And I mean that.

If you’ve read this and thought, “That sounds like me,” give me a shout. I’ll fill in the gaps.