💻 Senior Backend Engineer

1. You are a Backend Engineer with 5+ years of experience. Beyond strong software design skills, you know how to guide a team to build scalable, reliable backends: from well-structured services and data models to APIs and data pipelines that hold up under pressure.
2. You’ve worked with technologies like Postgres and ideally ElasticSearch, and you understand how to design and scale systems. You also have experience with Kubernetes and cloud services (GCP or otherwise). Kotlin may be new to you, and that’s fine: you master at least one general-purpose language and can coach others in improving their code. Bonus points for experience with Python.
3. You are naturally curious and encourage that in others. You make thoughtful choices in backend architecture and tooling — whether that’s Google Cloud, Kubernetes, observability stacks, or CI/CD — and you help your team navigate trade-offs.
4. Above all, you want to make an impact. You motivate your team to ship production-grade backend solutions that customers actually use. Together, you build systems that are robust, maintainable, secure, and valuable.

1. Aiden is a young software company based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Since November 2024, we’ve been part of the Shop Circle team - operating independently, with the perks of being in good company.
2. With a tight-knit group of talented and fun people, we’re building great software to improve the way e-commerce works for customers and businesses.
3. Our mission: making great product advice accessible to everyone. We create tools that help our clients transform their expertise into intelligent customer-facing applications, guiding customers to find the perfect product. Our customers include industry leaders like MediaMarkt, LG, and many others.
4. We’re a small team, and we like it that way. Our clients love it too. And for our team, it means more ownership, more freedom, and actually getting stuff done. So no ticket-shuffling, but engineers who own problems end-to-end rather than just executing predefined tasks.
5. We’re ambitious, but that doesn’t mean we’re an "always on" type of company. You’ll get the freedom and flexibility to do your best work, your way.
6. As for our tech stack: We work with Kotlin, ElasticSearch, PostgreSQL, Svelte and Elm, with our infrastructure running on Kubernetes in Google Cloud. We prefer a modular monolith over a microservices architecture.

You’ll work closely with closely with Mayon (Product Lead), Dennis (CTO) and a team of fullstack devs and AI engineers to further grow our product. Your role is about providing direction, strengthening the team, and ensuring we make the right technical choices.

In your first month, you will:

• Learn Aiden’s backend architecture, domains, and codebase to understand the systems you’ll evolve.
• Familiarize yourself with our stack (Kotlin, Postgres, APIs, Google Cloud) and our development workflows.
• Take your place as a sparring partner and mentor for the team.

In your first quarter, you will:

• Take end-to-end ownership of a backend domain and set the course for improvements in design, performance, reliability, and observability.
• Lead software design reviews, introduce best practices, and guide technical decisions.
• Work with your colleagues to refine requirements and translate them into scalable and maintainable solutions.

In your first year, you will:

• Drive larger architectural initiatives such as service boundaries, data modeling, performance and cost improvements, and platform reliability.
• Coach, mentor, and challenge other engineers so that the bar keeps rising on code quality, testing, and deployment.
• Grow into a technical leader within the team: someone who connects product vision with technical strategy and ensures we build faster and smarter together.

We zijn geen IT consultancy, dus we stoppen je niet in een leasewagen. Wat we wel doen (naast je salaris betalen) is een toffe werkplek regelen met enkele voordelen die de grote jongens je niet geven:

1. Vooral dit: je werkt bij een klein bedrijf. Welke rol je ook hebt, je hebt altijd directe impact op hoe we werken en groeien.
2. De mogelijkheid om deels vanuit huis te werken. We hebben een geweldig kantoor in hartje Utrecht, waar we je graag zo nu en dan zien. Maar werk je het liefst af en toe thuis en/of zo nu en dan vanuit een andere plek waar jij je goed voelt? Do it!
3. Vakantiedagen. Daar krijg je er 25 van.
4. Nieuwe-ouder-tijd! Als je een kind krijgt geven we je 2 weken extra bovenop het wettelijke verlof. Die tijd telt niet mee in je verdere vakantiedagen.
5. En natuurlijk tijd om te studeren, onderzoeken en je kennis uit te breiden. Er is veel kennis te delen binnen ons team en genoeg ruimte voor cursussen of eigen onderzoekstijd.

1. Create your CV and a brief description of why you'd be a good fit for us.
2. Send it to applications@aiden.cx.
3. We'll let you know within a few days if we see a potential match.