Staff Software Engineer - Platform in Nederland

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer – Platform based in Netherlands. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Platform team, you will define the long-term technical vision for a large-scale, event-driven streaming platform that powers real-time financial services. You will take ownership of the architecture, from the event backbone and shared client libraries to user-facing streaming infrastructure. Working primarily with Go and Redpanda, you will influence engineering standards, guide architectural decisions across teams, and help modernize systems through event-driven design. You will also contribute to authentication, developer experience, quality engineering, and AI-native development initiatives. This is a senior technical leadership role combining strategic direction, hands-on engineering, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship in a globally distributed environment. Accountabilities - Own platform architecture and technical strategy - Define the end-to-end architecture and two-to-three-year roadmap for the event streaming platform, including Redpanda, the UTS ecosystem, client libraries, and user-facing streaming services. - Lead the transition from batch-based processing to event-driven architectures across the organization, partnering closely with the teams responsible for individual systems. - Establish engineering standards for schema evolution, topic ownership, event replay, idempotency, backward compatibility, versioning, and deprecation. - Build reliable, scalable real-time systems - Design and optimize streaming infrastructure to support high-volume client connections, connection fan-out, slow consumers, backpressure, message ordering, and delivery guarantees. - Anticipate and address complex failure scenarios, particularly during periods of high market volatility.

- Own and evolve shared libraries and internal services used by multiple engineering teams. - Influence security and platform-wide engineering - Help shape authentication and authorization architecture, particularly where identity management intersects with streaming subscriptions, long-lived connections, token lifecycles, and multi-tenant isolation. - Contribute to developer experience, quality assurance, and AI-native engineering initiatives, ensuring that platform schemas, contracts, and event streams support agent-driven development workflows. - Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineering on chaos testing and resilience exercises, and with QA teams on test tooling and pre-production release gates. - Provide technical leadership and operational ownership - Drive architectural alignment across teams through technical proposals, design reviews, and influence rather than formal authority. - Mentor senior engineers, share expertise, and delegate meaningful technical work that supports the growth of others. - Participate in the platform on-call rotation and act as a technical lead during incidents affecting shared infrastructure. - Manage deployments and contribute hands-on across application code, infrastructure configuration, logs, metrics, and operational troubleshooting. Requirements: - Professional experience and technical expertise - At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including several years operating systems at significant scale. - Strong production-level expertise in Kafka or Redpanda, including partitioning, consumer groups, rebalancing, retention policies, delivery guarantees, and performance under load. - Experience delivering real-time data to clients at scale using technologies such as WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE), or gRPC streaming, with a solid understanding of fan-out, backpressure, and slow-consumer management.