Introduction


  • 36 hours per week
  • Start: 07 September 2026
  • End: 01 June 2027
  • Possible extension: Yes
  • ZZP is allowed
  • Hybrid way of work
  • Candidates MUST live in the Netherlands at this moment


The role in one line:

An independent backend engineer to help build, harden, and scale our secure APIs - strong on API craft, security, and testing, and able to help drive delivery, not just execute tickets.


Context:

Work across our API surface, held to real financial-institution standards for security, reliability, and testing. It's a deliberately simple, well-structured codebase. No internal/domain business knowledge required, that's owned in-house. We need backend and API strength.


Where they add the most value:


Since internal logic is covered, their leverage is on the partner-facing platform and developer experience:

- Growing the API surface cleanly (new endpoints, webhooks/callbacks, richer querying)

- Developer experience - clear contracts, published API specs, integration docs, sandbox environments

- Hardening - rate limiting, secret rotation, contract testing, pen-test remediation

- Scaling - repeatable multi-partner onboarding, tenant isolation, load/performance testing, caching

- Platform quality - SLOs, alerting, resilience patterns


Ways of working:

- Independent and self-directing - takes a capability from spec → design → tested delivery without hand-holding

- Helps manage the work - can break down a body of work, sequence it, and drive it to a clear "done"

- Spec- and documentation-driven - at home working from and writing specs, acceptance criteria, and decision records; a clear, concise writer

- Comfortable with AI-assisted / agentic development - this project is built heavily with agentic tooling; someone who can direct and review that output well is a real multiplier

- Quality-first and pragmatic - treats security, testing, and observability as ship-blocking, while favoring simple solutions over over-engineering


Requirements


Core skills:

- Modern backend development in TypeScript / Node.js - server-side HTTP services, networking fundamentals, clean typed code

- REST/JSON API design - versioning, consistent error contracts, idempotency, pagination, and an API-as-contract mindset (OpenAPI)

- Relational data - schema design, migrations, and a data-integrity mindset

- Asynchronous & queue-driven systems - background workers, job lifecycles, retries, idempotent processing

- API security - token-based auth (OAuth/JWT), authorization and tenancy isolation, secure secret handling, "fail-closed" defaults, and awareness of industry baselines (e.g. OWASP API Security Top 10)

- Test-forward development - comfortable driving work through unit, integration, and contract tests as a first-class part of building, not an afterthought

- Hands-on AWS experience (mandatory) - must know the specifics of core AWS services (containers/compute, queuing, managed databases, secrets, load balancing). Given the short timeline and MVP nature, we prefer they not need to onboard onto a new cloud;

- Cloud-native delivery - building and shipping containerized services, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform ideal), CI/CD pipelines

- Observability - structured logging, metrics, tracing, and audit trails; can debug production from telemetry


Nice-to-haves:

fintech or other regulated-domain experience · platform / API-gateway team background · leading a small delivery independently.


Senior Backend Engineer AWS/APIs

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