Platform Engineer Internal Developer Platform (Freelance)

We are looking for a talented Platform Engineer (Full Stack) to join our Internal Developer Platform (IDP) team at NN temporarily and help us achieve our goal of becoming a socially responsible tech company that delivers digital products our customers love.

What you are going to do

As a Platform Engineer within our IDP team, you will be responsible for enhancing the Engineering Experience within NN Group. By delivering the Internal Developer Platform as a new product, you aim to enhance Flow State, reduce Cognitive Load and improve Feedback Loops for developers across the company.

Based on user research within NN’s developer community, we have identified a top three of challenges that engineers are facing within NN:

• Knowing how to get stuff done in NN is hard.
• Our test environments make it impossible to have confidence in shipping software.
• Our road-to-production processes are unclear and ambiguous.

The Internal Developer Platform team aims to resolve these challenges by delivering a more integrated and frictionless engineering experience. The following features are part of the platform:

• Software Catalogue: catalogue of NN software and teams behind it
• Paved Roads: batteries included scaffolding for a new service
• Templates: productized building blocks you can use in your projects
• TechDocs: publish and discover documentation

Your main focus will be within the Future Ready en Synera AI programs of NN Group. The Zelda Internal Developer Portal (IDP) acts as the Experience Layer for Technology Platform Teams such as Agentic AI Platform, the Managed IaaS Platform, the Go Anywhere Platform etc. Zelda provides a unified front stage to standards, tooling, documentation, and workflows, playing a central role in streamlining software development within NN. Future Ready and Synera AI are strategic investments within Group IT and receive attention up to senior leadership level. The implementation is carried out in close collaboration between various Technology Platform teams, architecture, security and the central Zelda team.

Your role focuses on guiding and supporting platform teams that will land on Zelda. This landing requires both technical and process-based preparation, and requires teams to adopt new standards, development flows, and InnerSource principles. You will ensure that this transition takes place in a structured, timely and predictable manner.

The goal is to enable Technology Platform Teams to land on Zelda successfully, predictably and in a controlled manner, so that they can offer their services in a streamlined way through a modern, unified and well-supported developer experience.

You will navigate ground breaking terrain, leveraging technologies like serverless, Kubernetes, TypeScript, Node.js, React, AWS and Backstage. Your responsibilities include:

• Guiding platform teams through the landing on Zelda
• Coordination & alignment
• Improving processes & developer experience
• Build & Run our Backstage based Internal Developer Portal (TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch)
• Understand and apply API-first approach (MACH architecture)
• Understand and apply Domain Driven Design
• Authentication / RBAC / OAuth2 / IAM
• Work on CI/CD pipelines and automated tests
• Write great documentation (README.md and Wiki)
• Introduce InnerSource mechanisms to co-create selected platform features
• Security mindset (SAST/DAST and Threat Modeling)

What we offer you

• Competitive hourly rate depending on your knowledge and experience
• Assignment until 31-12-2026
• Hybrid way of working, partly from home and partly from the office in The Hague
• International working environment with loads of knowledge sharing

Who you are

Within the IDP team, we adopted the “No asshole” rule; we are looking for colleagues that are good at what they do and are also nice to work with. You bring a positive mindset and energy, which makes you an inspiration to collaborate with. You always have new ideas, you see possibilities and learn from situations. Furthermore, you recognize yourself in (multiple) of the following skills and experiences:

Hard skills

• Focusing on automation and integration
• Prioritizing security, costs & reliability
• Proficiency in cloud technologies (mostly AWS)
• Understanding of serverless architectures
• Understanding of containerization (Kubernetes on AWS)
• Experience in new developments such as GitOps (ArgoCD) and cloud resource orchestration (Crossplane)

Soft skills

• Teamwork and collaboration over personal success
• Seek first to understand, then to be understood
• Project management skills including coordination, organization, collaboration and communication skills
• Focus on solving important business and user problems by empathizing with the end user

Who you will work with

The Internal Developer Platform team is part of the Engineering Experience & Platforms domain. This domain is responsible for optimizing the NN engineering experience by delivering a frictionless and integrated engineering journey through the Internal Developer Platform and supporting the software delivery lifecycle with CI/CD solutions, while also offering several reliable platforms that provide integration or hosting solutions (e.g. API Gateway and Kubernetes). We serve DevOps teams within NN globally and we can measure our success using the DORA metrics (amongst others). We are successful when DevOps teams optimize their performance on deployment frequency, change lead time, change failure rate, and mean time to recover, aside from delivering a positive impact to developer happiness across the company.

The domain has a scale-up type of culture and consists of a group of energetic and empowered engineers and product teams. We strive to make Cloud-Native technology successful across the entire company (including our international units). We really value our culture and nourish it at every opportunity.

The IDP team has a strong product mindset. They work according to the double diamond model (design thinking) and have a UX designer and User Researcher within the team who empathize with the end user and clearly identify problems to resolve. The skilled engineers within the team work closely together with them to develop and deliver features that help resolve these problems and deliver value to the end users. This way of working maximizes outcome (value) and helps enhance the engineering experience for NN globally.