Backend engineer

Overview

Partnering with Aquent, we are seeking a highly skilled and passionate Backend Engineer to join a global leader in retail, a company renowned for its innovative approach to home furnishings and its commitment to customer satisfaction. This is an extraordinary opportunity to make a profound impact on systems that serve over 170,000 co-workers and manage millions of customer interactions annually across a vast global network of distribution centers and stores. You will be at the forefront of a major digital transformation, evolving legacy monoliths into a cutting-edge, highly scalable, and extensible event-driven architecture, directly influencing the efficiency and predictability of product flow worldwide.

As a key contributor, you will play a pivotal role in designing, developing, and running critical backend applications that empower co-workers to efficiently manage product receiving processes. Your work will directly enhance the user experience, ensuring our products are fast, consistent, and reliable in a dynamic multi-cloud environment. This is your chance to shape the future of global retail logistics, driving innovation and delivering high-quality software that is essential to achieving our vision of becoming the world’s leading multichannel home furnishing retailer.

This is a full-time 6-months-long salaried position, with option to extend. 

Due to the contracting nature of this role, only candidates with the unrestricted right to work in The Netherlands will be considered.

**Responsibilities:**

* Design, develop, deploy, release, and run robust and scalable backend applications within an event-driven architecture.
* Continuously improve existing products by designing new integrations and building impactful features.
* Apply and adhere to best-in-class software engineering practices, emphasizing simplicity, quality, and maintainability (e.g., SOLID, DRY principles).
* Contribute to the full product development lifecycle, from understanding complex problems and designing elegant solutions to delivering and operating systems in production.
* Provide technical support and guidance to fellow developers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and good practices.
* Actively contribute to the development of engineering standards and explore modern technologies to boost innovation and productivity.
* Identify, measure, and leverage data points to enhance the overall software engineering process and improve digital products.

**Qualifications:**

**Must-Have Skills & Experience:**

* Min. 7 years of professional experience as a Backend Engineer.
* Advanced training in Computer Science or a related field.
* Demonstrable experience working in agile and DevOps environments.
* Proficiency with Kotlin and/or Java (with Spring Boot/Cloud frameworks).
* Strong experience with cloud systems (vendor-independent knowledge preferred, with a focus on GCP).
* Expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
* Hands-on experience with container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes).

* Experience in designing new integrations for complex systems.
* Proven ability to develop high-quality, scalable software in a multi-cloud environment.
* Deep understanding and practical application of microservices and event-driven architectures.
* Commitment to user experience, ensuring fast and consistent product performance.
* Ability to confidently roll out new features and manage applications in production.

**Nice-to-Have Skills & Experience:**

* Familiarity with Node/Typescript environments.
* Experience in providing mentorship or guidance to junior developers.