Senior Software Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer €90,000 – €110,000 · Randstad · hybrid Most software you've worked on had to make money. This doesn't. Edtech, but the non-profit kind. No shareholders to satisfy, no roadmap bent toward the next upsell, no feature that exists because sales promised it. You optimise for the teacher and the student. That sounds like a values pitch. It's actually an engineering condition, and it's rarer than you think. Fifteen people, going to twenty That's the whole company. Which means these next hires aren't incremental; each one measurably changes what the organisation is capable of. That's why they're taking to find the right hire, and why I'm involved. No scaffolding, on purpose. They've deliberately not built the infrastructure a bigger company would have. No layers of process, no ticket factory, nobody assigning you work in the morning. They don't want it and at this size they don't need it, but it only holds if the people are right for it. So: you'd need to be someone who takes an ambiguous problem, works out what actually matters, and gets on with it. The wrong hire here isn't someone who lacks skill. It's someone who needs telling. The state of things, honestly The platform is early. Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, data-heavy, and a lot of it isn't built yet. You'd be designing the data models, the service interfaces, the async processing. Which is either exactly what you want or exactly what you don't. If you've spent the last few years carefully working around a decision someone made in 2019, this is the other side of that. If you need a spec and a backlog to feel safe, it isn't. What makes it worth a conversation Architecture decisions made in the room, not inherited. The people who understand the classroom sit close enough to argue with you, so your abstractions get tested against reality within days rather than quarters. And what you build is load-bearing, used in real lessons, all week, by teachers who will absolutely tell you when it's wrong. Who fits Deep Python, real experience with complex data-intensive systems, and strong opinions about clean architecture and type safety, the kind formed by maintaining the alternative, not by reading about it. FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, and BDD all help. Dutch is required. The product lives in Dutch classrooms, and you'll be in the details of it. They've built one of the best teams I've seen in my 12 years, really is something! I'll fill in the blanks when we talk.