Staff Backend Engineer

Backend Engineer Europe · Remote / Hybrid, Amsterdam HQ The company Business identity is still fundamentally broken. We're partnering with one of Europe's fastest-growing RegTech companies, building the infrastructure that allows businesses to prove who they are, who owns them and whether they can be trusted. Founded by former leaders from one of the fastest growing fintechs globally, they've raised €40m+ from globally leading technology investors and built a deliberately small, high-calibre team with experience across Stripe, Adyen, Google, Apple, Spotify, Miro and Klarna. They already work with sophisticated banks, fintechs and technology platforms, and the ambition goes well beyond better compliance software: infrastructure for portable business identity across companies, financial institutions and borders. The team This team owns onboarding. Business details, the people behind those businesses, registry integrations across jurisdictions, and the rest of what it takes to get a customer's customer verified. It's a small, self-directed squad of backend, frontend, design and product, with broad ownership for its size. Why this role exists At the centre of the product sits a policy engine that works out what a given business, in a given jurisdiction, under a given customer's risk appetite, needs to prove. This is the layer where that meets a real onboarding journey. The work now is to bring the two closer together, so what a customer experiences is driven by policy rather than assembled case by case, and what works for one customer works for the next fifty. How the product integrates is changing too, towards something that sits inside each customer's own product. The role You'll own backend problems end to end, in a domain where the hard part usually isn't the code. Compliance is complicated. Collecting a field is rarely the difficult bit. The harder questions are why it's required, which regulation drives it, which source it can legitimately come from, and what happens when the standard answer doesn't hold. A lot of the work is modelling: working out how something is supposed to behave, then representing it faithfully in the system. That understanding is still being built, so expect to revisit your own conclusions. This is not a scale role. Traffic is low, but every request matters. A dropped one can mean a sanctions issue, a fraudulent actor let through, or someone's money in the wrong place. If a million requests per second is what motivates you, this won't fit. If it's systems where nothing is allowed to quietly go wrong, it might. What great looks like You've worked somewhere the cost of a mistake was high, and you built the things that made it safe. The bar here is reasoning from first principles rather than knowing the vocabulary. You think like a product engineer and question the requirement before implementing it. You're pragmatic. Perfect routes are rare and you find the one that solves the problem without creating tomorrow's. You don't over-engineer either, because rigid solutions age badly in a domain still taking shape. You're comfortable when things get redefined, and you manage your own time. Nobody hands you a queue of tickets. Priorities get set together and you're expected to hold a view. You'll likely bring: Strong backend fundamentals and real production ownershipA background in fintech, banking, payments, compliance or similarly high-stakes systemsExperience with rule-heavy domains rather than high-throughput onesEvent sourcing experience, useful rather than essentialClear communication, and comfort moving between domains with significant autonomy What you'll help build The interesting question isn't how to onboard one more customer. It's how you take something as varied and exception-heavy as business identity and make it work as standard infrastructure, without rebuilding it for everyone who arrives. You'll be close to that question, and to the decisions that answer it. Why now The team is small, the ownership is broad, and the decisions made now will shape the product for years. Join early enough to make them.