Mission Critical Software Engineer - Backend

At Schuberg Philis, we specialize in Mission-Critical IT.

We partner closely with our customers and take full ownership of the systems that matter most - keeping them reliable, secure, and free of surprises.

We are a small player in a big ecosystem, so we value T-shaped engineers who adjust to what the customer context needs rather than hiding behind a single specialism.

Our impact comes from engineers who go deep, automate everything they touch, and take responsibility end-to-end without silos and handovers. The engineers who design the platform are the ones who run it. This is hands-on engineering in the truest sense: you design, you build, you run it, and you make sure it keeps working.

What you will do

In this role, you'll join a customer-dedicated self-steering team with a strong engineering culture, working side by side with a high-tech scale-up client in the object-detection radar space. You will take ownership of a critical legacy codebase and turn it into a system that can scale, evolve, and operate reliably in the field. You will not patch around the edges, rather you will fix and re-architect the fundamentals of the system – untangling dependencies, increasing reliability, building observability, and improving build and release processes.

Concretely, you will:

• Re-architect the current codebase into a modular, flexible system, with a logical split in independently managed components with clear responsibilities and ownership,
• Design and implement a standardized CI/CD pipeline, replacing all manual steps and inconsistencies in build and release processes,
• Introduce automated testing and enforce quality gates across the lifecycle,
• Improve lifecycle management through proper versioning, release control, and deployment consistency,
• Build observability into the system to make field behavior transparent and actionable,
• Work directly with the customer – together on site - to make decisions, prioritize improvements, and keep the high pace of delivery, supporting their fast growth every step of the way.

What you bring

You're an experienced engineer who combines strong software development fundamentals with a pragmatic, systems-level mindset. C++ is a must-have language, but a varied stack matters too. Rust/Go experience is a plus.

Must-haves:

• 8+ years' professional software (backend) development, with strong, current C++ expertise (modern C++; CMake and Linux build toolchains) and at least one other language (Rust / Go preferred),
• Solid experience with software architecture and design - decoupling monoliths, design patterns, SOLID, managing dependencies and shared components,
• Experience with mission-critical, embedded, or hardware-coupled systems and software lifecycle management,
• Knowledge of observability tooling and practices (logging, metrics, alerting) and secure-by-design / shift-left practices in the pipeline,
• Hands-on with modern engineering practices: Git branching strategies, enforced PR/code review, test automation, CI/CD and continuous delivery,
• Proven ability to design and maintain automated test suites for complex systems,
• Comfortable with Linux, SQL/relational databases, and managing OS/runtime dependencies and versioning (semantic versioning),
• Observability tooling — logging, metrics, and alerting — and security-by-design / shift-left practices in the pipeline,
• Experience working in self-steering, DevOps teams and coaching fellow developers,
• Experience working directly with stakeholders or customers in an engineering context,
• Excellent communication skills in English,
• Currently based in the Netherlands.

Nice to have:

• Experience in industrial, edge, or real-time systems,
• Experience in distributed, loosely coupled landscapes where software interacts with physical devices at the edge,
• Hardware development, FPGA or real-time/sensor systems background,
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes),
• AI-assisted development.

Who you are

You're not just a specialist: you take responsibility for the whole. You think in systems and not only in code. You know how your work behaves in production and care about making it reliable, maintainable, and transparent. You automate by default and treat manual work as a signal for improvement.

You're comfortable in a self-steering team where responsibility is shared, decisions are made close to the work, and quality is owned by the people building the system. You contribute beyond your core expertise when needed and help raise the bar around you.

Most of all, you take end-to-end ownership, from code to outcome.

What can you expect?

At Schuberg Philis, you’ll join a community of engineers with an awesome combination of exceptionally high security standards, an infatuation with automation, and the power to make a positive, sustainable impact on customers’ business. Due to the nature of our customer engagements, there is no pressure on (billable) hours; we focus on quality and impact – or how we like to call it: “freedom & responsibility”. You know best how to deliver the most value.

You’ll be embedded in a company committed to helping colleagues grow as people and professionals through training, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and good old-fashioned fun.

Our offices are high-quality workspaces, and we go way beyond what is expected. We have productive equipment, good food and drinks, team outings, family days, labs to experiment with innovative technologies, etc. We’re active in relevant tech communities, attending and organizing meetups and conferences, and we organize internal knowledge sharing events where Tech Leads play an important role.

If you are a seasoned engineer in the Netherlands who wants to combine deep technical work with customer contact and impact, we’d love to hear from you.

Please note: you need to be currently based in the Netherlands.