Senior Backend Engineer

🚀 Build the backbone of the world’s best onboarding platform and help the team level up as you go! 🚀

About the role 🧐

Are you the technical rockstar we’re looking for? We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to lead the design and evolution of the services that power Appical’s onboarding platform.

Your work will shape how hundreds of customer organizations welcome new hires and support their journeys. You’ll work primarily in Ruby on Rails, own critical services end-to-end, and drive pragmatic technical decisions that balance speed, reliability, and long-term maintainability.

In this role, you'll be joining the Product & Development team. A team led by Gijs Hendrix.

What you’ll do

• Lead the design, implementation, and rollout of backend features and platform capabilities in Ruby on Rails, with a bias for shipping value in small, measurable increments.
• Own system quality, performance, reliability, security, and cost. Instrument services, define SLOs, and use observability to guide improvements.
• Evolve APIs and data models to remain fast, reliable, and secure as customer volumes grow. Champion clear contracts and backwards-compatible changes.
• Break down complex work with product and design, shape scope, and provide crisp estimates and trade-off recommendations.
• Raise engineering standards: improve CI/CD, test strategy, documentation, and post-incident learning. Model thoughtful code reviews and pair when it helps the team move faster.
• Mentor engineers: share context, review designs, and help others grow from good to great.
• Contribute to our journey toward a more modular service architecture (e.g., extracting and hardening boundaries where it unlocks speed and autonomy).

You’re a match if you… 💗

• Have 6–10+ years building production software (ideally SaaS) with substantial time in Ruby/Rails or a comparable MVC framework and are ready to be fully productive quickly.
• Can design and evolve APIs, schemas, and background processing at scale; you think in data flows, failure modes, and operability.
• Are fluent in automated testing strategies (unit, integration, contract), performance profiling, and pragmatic refactoring.
• Communicate trade-offs clearly (speed vs. scope vs. tech debt) while keeping customer value front and center.
• Enjoy mentoring, leading by influence, and upleveling a team’s practices without adding unnecessary ceremony.
• Bonus: experience with AWS, Docker, or other cloud-native tooling; exposure to React is a plus.
• Education is great, but equivalent practical experience speaks loudest.

Don’t worry if you don’t meet all the criteria; a growth mindset and eagerness to learn are more important than ticking all the boxes.

At Appical we’re all about teamwork! You’ll collaborate daily with engineers, product owners and QA to achieve the best results. Constructive feedback and continuous learning keep us sharp.

What you'll get 🎉

• A challenging full-time position (40 hours) with plenty of freedom and responsibility.
• You will become part of a unique scale-up organization with over 45 inspiring and talented colleagues.
• Option to exchange knowledge and experiences with colleagues from other international Visma companies.
• Cool office in Amsterdam-Noord (Pand Noord - Meeuwenlaan).
• An open and inclusive culture with lots of freedom and room for initiative.
• Competitive salary (Between €4.600,- and €6.500,- fulltime) based on your level of experience.
• An extensive pension plan to be tailored to your needs.
• A MacBook.
• Opportunity to participate in OneFit (company fitness) at a discount or other gym memberships.
• Hybrid and flexible work schedule.
• Opportunity for workations for 4 weeks per year.
• Daily delicious and healthy lunch.
• Access to mental well-being platform OpenUp for big or small challenges, whether work-related or not.
• We value personal growth, and Appical supports your ambition and professional development with various resources, training, and workshops.
• A Fun Committee that organizes fun activities such as board game nights, sports events, and theme parties.

About us 😃

"New beginnings start here!"

Since our establishment in 2012, we have been fully dedicated to transforming the world of pre- and onboarding. With our interactive platform, we offer newcomers worldwide a warm welcome and an unforgettable start. Together, we can turn every new beginning into an unforgettable experience!

Our mission goes beyond just the first day of work; we create digital, personal onboarding experiences from start to finish. We support organizations in successfully integrating new colleagues during their initial period of employment, as well as during any transitions they may experience thereafter (think of reboarding and offboarding).

With over 450 clients and 620,000+ users now, and as a proud member of the Visma family, we invite you to join us in further expanding the success of Appical!

Sounds good, right?

Are you the Senior Backend Engineer we're looking for? Then we'd love to receive your cv and motivation letter. We look forward to meeting you!

Note: We do not work with external recruiters for this position.