Backbase
Principal System Engineer
Located in Amsterdam, our EMEA HQ offices are a stone’s throw away from the beautiful NEMO Science Museum, and the Amsterdam Central train station. Famous for its breathtaking architecture, canals, and over 881,000 bikes, Amsterdam is a city that’s easy to fall in love with.
As a Principal System Engineer, you will join the crossfunctional team (System, Security and Software engineers) owning our Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS), “Grand Central”.
Our platform enables our customers (banks, financial institutions) to build and run integrations in a reliable and efficient way.
In this key role, you will be the technical authority for the platform. You will lead the vision and strategy for its uptime, automation, performance, security, and long-term architecture.
Your technical leadership will be essential in bringing this platform to the next level. You won't just contribute—you will define and drive the technical roadmap to scale our services and shape the future of our IPaaS.
We are looking for a seasoned, hands-on engineer who is both a strategic thinker and a “doer”. Deep expertise in our core technologies is a must: Cloud (Azure), Kubernetes, Istio, Networking, Infrastructure as Code, Automation and Observability.
You excel at diagnosing and resolving the most complex systemic issues, while equally enjoying the challenge of architecting and building resilient, scalable systems from the ground up.
If you are an excellent communicator who can mentor fellow engineers, articulate complex technical decisions to diverse stakeholders, and thrive in a fast-paced, multi-team environment, we would love to hear from you. Please consider applying!
What you'll do
- Own the Architecture: Design, build, and lead the evolution of our Integration Platform running in Azure, ensuring it meets the highest standards of scalability, performance, and resilience.
- Guarantee Platform Integrity: Take ultimate ownership of the availability and reliability of the platform we provide to our customers, implementing and driving strategies for uptime and operational excellence.
- Champion Best Practices: Architect and implement best-in-class solutions for cloud security, compliance, and disaster recovery, ensuring the platform operates in a secure and cost-effective manner at all times.
- Lead Incident Response: Participate in and lead on-call rotations, serving as the final point of escalation for complex issues to ensure maximum reliability and availability.
- Drive Operational Excellence: Proactively identify and eliminate operational inefficiencies through automation, sophisticated monitoring, and strategic cost management initiatives.
- Mentor and Elevate: Foster a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence by mentoring team members, sharing expertise, and leading by example.
Who you are
- Core Qualifications:
- Extensive Experience: 6+ years of experience in system engineering, with a proven track record of designing, implementing, and running scalable, highly-available workloads in enterprise cloud environments.
- Technical Leadership: Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to drive technical initiatives and decisions across multiple teams and stakeholders.
- Autonomous & Proactive: You work independently, take initiative, and can lead complex projects from concept to completion with minimal oversight.
- Mentorship Mindset: You combine deep technical expertise with a passion for mentorship, providing peers with hands-on guidance and collaborative problem-solving.
- Automation-First Philosophy: Your primary goal is to make every process predictable, repeatable, and fully automated.
- Security Expertise: You possess a deep and practical understanding of cloud infrastructure and software security principles. Technical Proficiencies:
- Infrastructure as Code: Expert-level user of Terraform or OpenTofu.
- Kubernetes Ecosystem: Proficient with Helm, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and Kustomize.
- Service Mesh: Hands-on experience configuring, maintaining, and optimizing Istio.
- Observability: Skilled in using metrics for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting, with strong experience in Prometheus and Grafana.
- Networking: Solid experience with cloud networking concepts (VPN, VNet/VPC, routing, firewalls).
- Programming: Comfortable reading and writing code to solve automation and integration challenges (Python or Go preferred). Preferred Qualifications (Bonus Points):
- Experience with Knative.
- Significant hands-on work experience with Microsoft Azure.
- Professional background in FinTech or with other IPaaS solutions.