Python Software Engineer -Infrastructure team

Your job:

In this position, you will join the Python Infrastructure and Performance (PIP) team, which currently consists of two members and the team lead. The team’s vision is a codebase that we would be proud to open-source. The team cares a lot about doing things properly and sets high standards in their work in terms of maintainability, performance, and security. Taking a broader view, this team is responsible for improving the codebase on a systemic level, writing proposals for architectural changes, and facilitating discussions with other development teams (the primary customers).

Your challenges:

• Continuously improve the maintainability and quality of our Python codebase.

  • Example: modeling all the requests and responses in our HTTP endpoints

• Remove technical debt by modernizing legacy code, upgrading dependencies and carrying out large-scale migrations and refactoring.

  • Example: migrating Pydantic from v1 to v2

• Monitor and improve the performance of our API endpoints and of our background jobs.

  • Example: rewriting performance-critical code in Rust

• Improve the performance and correctness of our test suite.

• Work on security improvements together with other security specialists in the company.

  • Examples: Single Sign-On, security improvements to authentication tokens

• Collaborate with other developers to learn about what problems and opportunities they see.

• Building new features will not be the primary focus of this team.

We use the following technologies and tools:

• Languages: Python (3.13), PostgreSQL

• Libraries: pydantic, sqlalchemy, typing, requests, logging, flask, fastapi, pytest

• Tools: mypy, ruff, Sentry, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki

Who are you?

You are committed to high engineering standards; you care about making things robust and easy to maintain. Making other developers’ lives easier makes you happy.

You don’t just want things to work: you also want to understand how and why they work. You love diving deeply into technical details and finding creative solutions to complex problems. You can be pragmatic, but also truly enjoy doing things the right way.

You like working in a team and taking ownership of your projects. You can communicate and coordinate with colleagues across teams effectively.

You also:

• Have excellent backend development skills in Python or similar languages.

• Have significant experience working on larger production codebases.

• Are experienced with web technologies.

• Have experience with typing (mypy) in Python.

• Have a good working knowledge of Linux, git, and the command line.

• Live in The Netherlands or are willing to relocate, and are in possession of a valid work permit (if you’re a non-EU citizen).

Nice to have:

• Are comfortable with SQL and relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL.

• Experience in optimizing performance of database queries and application code.

• Having worked with distributed systems before.

Important note: we understand that studies show women may only apply for roles when they feel they meet 100% of the requirements, therefore, we strongly encourage you to apply even if you don’t check every box, as we are looking for passionate individuals with potential and a willingness to grow.