Mission Critical Software Engineer - Backend

Full-time Schiphol-Rijk 32-40 hours 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 (required to apply).

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 dev