Senior Backend Developer - Team Equipment

Senior Backend Developer - Team Equipment

Rentman is a B2B SaaS scaleup where we build the leading operations management platform to support event and media production teams. Think of us as the JetBrains for the event and media world.

Our product is our main and only focus. So if you want to work on, and improve, a long-term codebase, and think about the larger technical and product picture, then Rentman can be an interesting match for you.

Our users plan everything from small shoots to massive festivals in 70+ countries, and they all rely on Rentman to keep their gear, people, and timing perfectly in sync.

We’re based in Utrecht (NL) with a second office in Toronto (CA), and our 100+ team members work in a culture that’s open, flat, and inclusive, where curiosity drives us, ownership matters, and everyone has the freedom to challenge ideas and make an impact.

About the equipment team

Every festival, corporate event and wedding around the world depends on equipment, such as speakers, microphones, rigging and lights, which are stored across countries in many warehouses. The logistics of getting the right equipment in the right place at the right time is a large and complex operational undertaking, which is the speciality of dedicated logistical teams within event rental companies. Our equipment product is the backbone of how our users make sure the right equipment gets to the right place, at the right time.

When working in Rentman's equipment team it’s important to understand that the lines you see on the screen are not just lines of code, but actual flight cases full of speakers, microphones, lights, and cables being loaded into trucks, and being used on festivals and other events all over the world. The code you write is indispensable in running these events in an efficient operational manner.

To keep these warehouse operations fast and smooth, Rentman offers both a web app and a mobile app, which integrates with Zebra scanner devices to support barcode and RFID scanning. (You might have seen these devices at your local Albert Heijn in the Netherlands.)

Recent features of the equipment team

The roadmap of the equipment team is quite extensive, but here are a few features that you could have worked on:

Easily marking equipment as returned using “Scan return”

At the end of a long festival weekend it can happen that multiple trucks full of equipment all come back to the warehouse around the same time. Getting all these flight cases checked, filled, and stored can be a labour-intensive task, and in order to offer perfect traceability, the system also needs to be updated to reflect the latest state of this equipment.

With the “Scan return” feature in the app you can easily scan any piece of equipment, and the software will automatically mark it as returned from the relevant projects. You can also easily fill flight cases before storing them so that the next time you need to pack a project, you know exactly where every piece of equipment is.

Getting the user flow just right here is a very tricky thing: warehouse workers don't want to check their scanner all the time, since they have a whole lot of equipment to scan, check, and store. On the other hand, they need to be aware when something needs their attention. There's a very delicate balance between speed and accuracy that we need to keep in mind during development.

Traceability of your equipment in the “History log”

Every large-scale warehouse will have thousands of equipment items moving around at any given moment. Since in real-life situations not every process is perfect, it can always happen that things are not in the place you expect them to be. With our History Log we accurately track every action that happens with an equipment item: When it was last scanned, who last handled this item, where it was repaired, and on which projects it was.

From a product perspective it was important to create an information-dense view, while maintaining the possibility to quickly find what you're looking for: Our users mostly needed a place to figure out what went wrong, when inevitably an item went missing, or didn't end up where it was supposed to be. We ended up opting for an e-commerce inspired filtering system, which we hadn't done before in other views. We went for this solution because of its established nature, making it easy to recognize for most users. It also offers good usability, making it easy to find what you're looking for.

From a technical point of view the challenge lies in storing this enormous amount of data, the code that filters this data is as fast as we can get it, and making sure that the UX to explore this data is as easy and clean as possible.

Easily planning back-to-back projects with “Rollovers”

We're currently looking into facilitating a much more flexible way of scheduling and tracking equipment. Since event suppliers are increasingly trying to make their logistical operations more efficient, we're facing some challenges with regards to new methods of planning and tracking equipment. One example of this is what we internally call "Rollovers", which is when equipment isn't returned to the warehouse after an event, but instead "rolls over" straight into the next event.

Since this will affect the way our users schedule equipment, which is at the very core of what our product offers, we need to handle this very delicately, as it affects our users' routines. Increasing flexibility without increasing complexity is the name of the game here.

Our way of working

Rentman currently has 5 self-sufficient development teams, with plans to expand to 7 in the near future to realise all of our product goals.

• Team equipment
• Team project management - Responsible for our soon-to-be-released Organize product
• Team crew - Responsible for all crew needs. Planning, budgets, and time tracking
• Team lifecycle - Responsible for everything related to onboarding and customer health
• Team financials

We strive to have all development teams self-sufficient and self-structured. A perfect development team consists of 2 frontend developers, 2 backend developers, a product owner, a QA engineer and a designer.

While every team is free to set their own structure and goals, currently all teams work in a traditional scrum way. 2 week sprints, with a retro to end the sprint.

Customer understanding is important at Rentman, so we facilitate visiting warehouses, interacting with customers at our “Rentman live” events, and joining various trade shows to hear first-hand from our customers how they experience our software.

Our tech stack in a nutshell

Our front-end is an Angular based SPA with over 3.500 components. It is based on a custom-made design system, and the main data-views are powered by AG-Grid. We strive to stay up-to-date with all latest developments, and we usually migrate to the latest Angular versions within 2 weeks of a new release.

We smartly process thousands of item records in the front-end caching layer, and actively keep client states in sync through a custom made websocket structure.

Our back-end is a custom-made PHP framework, with a queryable API interface similar to GraphQL (but we built ours before GraphQL existed 😉).

We take development-at-scale very seriously, and have fully typed our frontend, and even have a custom-made php-to-typescript system so that our frontend-to-backend communication is also properly typed.

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years of backend development experience, with product led companies
• Deep SQL expertise, including database design and performance optimisation
• Proven experience leading complex feature development end-to-end
• Strong problem-solving ability, balancing long-term quality with fast-paced delivery
• Collaborative communicator who can bring focus and structure to an enthusiastic team
• Positive mindset towards using AI in the development toolchain (The development landscape is changing rapidly, and at Rentman we’re open to exploring how this can benefit us in our day-to-day work)

For us, experience with PHP is a strong plus. Familiarity with AWS or infrastructure-as-code is also valuable, but not a requirement. At Rentman, we believe solid engineering fundamentals matter more than specific tools, and that a curious developer can grow into new technologies, including full-stack work, when the problem calls for it.

What you'll get

• An ambitious, inclusive, diverse international team
• Competitive salary (+8% holiday benefit), based on experience
• A “13th month” annual bonus based on company results
• 25 days of paid vacation, plus one extra day off each year from your 2nd year onwards up to your 5-year anniversary
• A paid 4-week sabbatical after 5 years to go on an adventure
• Flexible WFH policy and work from anywhere for 4 weeks a year
• A shiny Windows, Linux or Mac of your choice
• An annual training budget to boost your skill
• A pension plan via BrightPensioen
• Access to OpenUp for mental well-being and personal growth
• Sports activities (Rentman football team, squash and padel) and an Urban Sports fitness subscription
• An OV Business card if you live further than 10km away from the office
• A flexible and engaging work environment with free lunches, office perks (PS5, Ping Pong, D&D), legendary karaoke parties, and various team activities
• An amazing office in the heart of Utrecht, Netherlands, at the historical Drift 17