Senior Backend Engineer

About us

At WhiteSpace, we bring care back to critical decisions. Our AI-powered solutions don't replace human judgment - they elevate it. By combining advanced algorithms with deeply human interfaces, we turn complexity into clarity and confident action. Always with fast time to value.

Behind that is a team of around 25 consultants and engineers with the delivery discipline to take a client's problem all the way to something they use to make better, faster decisions. Our use cases span energy, manufacturing, logistics, and health — and every one of them runs on backend services and infrastructure that someone has to own properly.

Role purpose

You deliver large, complex backend and infrastructure work end to end, independently, within the direction set by the backend lead and tech lead. You own a substantial slice (a service, a subsystem, a data pipeline, an environment, a migration) from problem statement to running in production and understood by others.

What you own

• Production services. API contracts, data models, migrations, background jobs, and explicit failure behaviour — designed, built, and operated.
• Debugging across repo boundaries — engine, server, manifests, configs — finding the actual cause rather than the nearest symptom.
• The codebase you leave behind. You review other people's code and leave things more consistent than you found them.
• Feedback into the shared setup. Recurring patterns and recurring pain come back with a proposal attached, not a complaint.

You make design decisions inside your scope and live with them. You escalate when it is genuinely a fork in the road, not to transfer the decision.

Key interfaces

• Backend/DevOps Lead and Tech Lead. They set the direction for the discipline; you apply it well, and push back with evidence when a standard doesn't fit the case.
• Algorithm and frontend engineers. You define the contracts between layers early, before either side has built against an assumption.
• Non-specialists. You explain trade-offs in terms of consequence — what breaks, what it costs, what it buys.
• Colleagues. You coach and mentor colleagues in your area of expertise. You give them real scope and review it properly.

You report to the CTO/Tech Lead.

Must haves

• Python and API design at depth — versioning, idempotency, pagination, authn/z. Roughly 5+ years building and running production backends.
• PostgreSQL beyond CRUD, including migrations that have to run against live data.
• Kubernetes in the cloud (we run GKE), Helm/Kustomize, resource limits, autoscaling, ingress.
• CI/CD and IaC you write yourself. GitHub Actions and Terraform — you make the pipeline and infra changes your work needs rather than waiting for someone else to.
• Observability tooling — structured logging, metrics, dashboards, alerts that mean something.
• Enough security practice to not have to be corrected on it. Least privilege, secrets, data retention, practical GDPR/ISO 27001 hygiene inside an ISMS.
• AI-first by default. You use agentic tooling to move faster and to raise quality rather than volume, and you own everything it produces.

Nice to haves

• GCP depth: IAM, Secret Manager, networking, cost attribution.
• Experience with multi-tenant or multi-environment delivery.
• Secondary languages — TypeScript at the API boundary, Go for infra services.

What this role is not

We'd rather be clear up front. This role does not set discipline-wide architecture alone — you

contribute to it, you don't unilaterally decide it. It does not own the cross-company toolchain and shared foundation — you use it and improve it. And it does not commit scope and timelines to clients. It is also not a role for someone who needs a lot of active management, or who wants to be handed tickets to push.

Terms & Conditions

• €79,800 base per year + 8% holiday allowance + 4% pension contribution
• One-year contract, based in the Netherlands, with the intention to extend to a permanent position.
• One-month trial period, in which you will be given tangible scope to complete.
• Hybrid work environment — we trust you to balance remote and office; some office presence may be required.
• Fluent English required.
• Annual profit-sharing scheme, dependent on company performance, individual delivery, and alignment with company values.