Principal Backend Engineer
Principal Backend Engineer
As Principal Software Engineer you take the product to the next level, while improving related processes and empowering teams and other Software Engineers. You develop software, creating clean and maintainable code which helps with building an expanding product. Your tailor-made code seamlessly integrates our products with customers’ systems. You ensure our solutions are tested, accessible, extensible, maintainable, secure and perform well. You have great attention for detail, and can help principals and leads get a perspective on the full picture. In this role, you work in an empowered team of highly skilled software developers, QA engineers, scrum masters, and product owners.
What you'll do
You spend less time writing code and more doing different things like improving processes, architectural oversight, mentoring other engineers, and interfacing with other business units. You help prototyping and validation of new architecture and technology ideas, ways of working, efficiency gains and refactoring initiatives.
Working across departments, fostering collaboration, and being the face of our product vision and success internally and externally. You help the organisation to ensure the technical vision is known and implemented in development activities. You also interact with teams from pre-sales and customer success to ensure technology feedback from customers and field engineers is incorporated. You provide advice based on experience and deep technical understanding of software development, practices and frameworks.
Leading by example, radiating our way of working and our path to success, you take on the expert role in all topics related to Backend.
Who you are
● Min 8 years of experience in a similar role;
●Bachelor in Information Technology, Computer Sciences or similar/related technical field, or equivalent practical experience;
●Excellent English speaking, writing and presentation skills.
Knowledge & Application:
●Performs at the highest level in their team, sharing their knowledge with others;
●Is well known in their chapter and becomes known in the guild;
●Is involved on product support and CS/RnD collaboration;
●Spends 10→25% of their time not coding;
●Consistently writes production-ready code that is easily testable, free of glaring issues, easily understood by other developers, and accounts for edge cases and errors;
●Understands when it is appropriate to leave comments, but biases towards self-documenting code, easy to maintain;
●Understands their team's domain at a high level and can gather sufficient context to work productively within it. Has expertise in a portion of their team's domain;
●Advanced knowledge of the main framework and basic understanding of other related or similar frameworks;
●Stays up to date with changes in their discipline and their industry;
●Understands the different testing levels and testing types and contributes to the Test Strategy;
●Designs tests with the usage of test methodologies by applying different testing types (functional, non-functional) in alignment with the acceptance criteria;
●Can write automated test cases in different testing levels not only for a single functionality but also for the whole system under test;
●Contributes to the testing framework;
●Knows exactly what security features our product offers, and uses or implements them in their software;
●Takes active part in improving other NFRs like accessibility or performance
e.g. tests a11y and performance of their software, raises issues to their PO, contributes into fixing any identified issues;
●Consistently designs code that is aligned with the overall service architecture; ●Utilizes abstractions and code isolation effectively;
●Exposed to all capabilities of the Backbase Platform;
●Understands how to version code, and how to contribute to a shared repository;
●Understands how to leverage existing tools and facilities to automate software delivery, and ship his code to production;
●Knows and understands the CI/CD phases in their project;
●Can execute maintenance tasks on the project pipelines and adjust them to comply with new requirements;
●Understands all aspects of how the software is built, assembled and run in production;
●Periodically ensures the compliance of the projects they works on with the expected SDLC workflow;
●Reviews tasks critically and ensures they’re appropriately sized for continuous integration and incremental delivery;
●Ensures tasks are prioritised correctly, and that dependencies are noted.
Complexity & Problem Solving:
●Proficient at using systematic debugging to diagnose all issues located to a single service. Uses systematic debugging to diagnose cross service issues, sometimes with help from more senior engineers;
●Code is free of breaking changes. If breaking changes are unavoidable, they are planned and communicated several months in advance to minimise impact on consumers;
●Is the go-to person for technical questions and issues;
●Suggests, plans and performs complex code refactoring and technical improvement, and knows the overall technical debt of the software;
●The test cases execution is prioritised based on risk;
●Writes all kinds of tests, uses all kinds of tools that improve the overall quality of the code and the software;
●The designed test cases cover positive and negative scenarios as well as edge cases and errors;
●Approaches all engineering work with a security lens;
●Actively looks for security vulnerabilities both in the code and when providing peer reviews;
●Creates coherent designs with multiple components interacting across API or system boundaries;
●Understands how to debug and improve existing tools and facilities for software delivery automation;
●Fixes build and test pipelines and workflows in their project.
Collaboration & Interaction:
●The results of testing are reported in a language that is understandable by technical and non-technical stakeholders;
●Is aware of the operational data for their team’s domain and uses it as a basis for suggesting stability and performance improvements;
●Is able to interact with the customers and support them with the issues they have on the capabilities the team owns;
●Is able to provide workarounds and give clear feedback to the team how the product should be improved;
●Provides advice for customers, customer success & pre-sales on the best practices how the product line should be used/implemented;
●Can explain why certain product decisions were made in the past (regardless of who made the decision);
●Knows whom to contact in the organization for which topic;
●Works across departments;
●Interacts with teams from pre-sales and customer success to ensure the technology feedback from customers and field engineers is incorporated into product;
●Establishes strong and trusted relationships with customers, internal and external stakeholders;
●Is capable of implementing and proposing improvements to the existing tooling and processes;
●Has regular working sessions with engineers from other teams, throughout the SDLC e.g. technical design sessions, workshops, PoCs;
●Knows when a ticket is not ready and challenges their PO before planning its work;
●Helps BAs and POs write clear tickets based on technical designs;
●Monitors the support Slack channel of their product and answers questions or delegates to other engineers in their chapter.
Join our team at Backbase, one of the LinkedIn Top Companies of 2023 in the Netherlands! We're known for our great work environment and providing opportunities for career growth. We’re also committed to fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and growth. As a member of our team, you'll have the chance to work with some of the brightest and most talented people in the industry, as well as help shape the future of digital banking. Come join us and be part of something special.
Our Perks
Loud and busy sometimes but always friendly, helpful, and super fun. We love to celebrate each other’s achievements, share jokes, and our love for food, movies, traveling, and sports. We’re one big and diverse family working towards the same goal.
Lunch
Free, healthy lunches every day. Plus snacks and drinks.
Social
Friday parties every month. Office boat you can use with your team.
Health
Discounted gym membership through our corporate fitness plan.
Training budget
Specific budget for your personal development.
Clothing
You can wear clothes you feel comfortable in.
High spec equipment
We provide all employees with high-spec Macs and tech set up.
