Backend Engineer, Payments
Move other people's money on a schedule, and make every attempt explain itself afterwards.
Amsterdam · Hybrid, three days in office · Full-time
Salary band · published
€62,000 – €78,000
EUR per year · Mid · IC3
Role at a glance
- Team
- Payments
- Reports to
- Tomas Ekdahl, Co-founder & CTO
- Level
- Mid · IC3
- Location
- Amsterdam, three days a week in the office
- Band
- €62,000 – €78,000 EUR per year
- Equity
- Options in the offer, four-year schedule
- Start
- From September 2026
About the role
Payments is where a queue of approved supplier bills becomes one payment run, and where a card authorisation becomes a settled transaction some days later. Both are ordinary right up until a bank returns something unexpected, which is the half of the job that matters.
You would work on the payment run, the card authorisation path and the integrations underneath both. The standard we hold ourselves to is that every euro that leaves an account can be traced back to who approved it and what it paid for, without anyone opening a support ticket to find out.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain the payment run: batching, approval thresholds, and what happens when a single instruction in a batch fails.
- Own the card authorisation path, from the network message to the ledger entry it becomes.
- Handle returns, recalls and duplicates so a controller sees a correction rather than a mystery.
- Integrate new banking partners and keep the ones we have honest with contract tests.
- Carry the payments pager one week in six, alongside four other engineers.
What you'll bring
- Two or more years writing backend services that other people depend on being correct.
- Comfort with a relational database and with the idea that a retry must not pay twice.
- An instinct for the failure case — what a partner does when it is slow rather than down.
- The habit of writing the test that fails loudly before the code that makes it pass.
- Enough written English to explain a decision, and the alternative you rejected, to someone who was not in the room.
Nice to have
- Worked with SEPA, SWIFT or a card network's message formats.
- Kotlin or Go — payments is Kotlin, but we care far more about what you have shipped than what in.
- Been on call for something that moved money, and remember what you changed afterwards.
How we hire
Four steps, and a decision either way.
The same four for every role.No take-home that eats a weekend, and no round that exists to see whether you will put up with another round.
- Intro
A thirty-minute call
With the hiring manager, never a recruiter. You ask about the work, we ask what you have actually owned.
Same week you apply
- Craft
One piece of real work
A ninety-minute exercise taken from our own backlog — paid at your day rate if you would rather it were.
90 minutes, paid
- Team
Meet the three people
The ones you would sit beside, including whoever would review your code or sign off your ledger.
Two hours, one day
- Offer
A yes or a reason
A yes carries the band and the start date. A no carries why. Nobody is left to work it out from silence.
Inside two weeks
Benefits
Eight things you get on day one.
The same eight in Amsterdam and Lisbon.Nothing here is discretionary and nothing is a perk you have to ask twice for.
- Salary band, published
- Every advert carries its range. The same band in both cities, adjusted only for local tax.
- Equity in every offer
- Options on a four-year schedule with a one-year cliff, and ten years to exercise them.
- Three days in, two out
- Tuesday to Thursday in the office. Nobody schedules a meeting on the other two.
- Thirty days off
- Plus public holidays where you work, and the week between Christmas and New Year.
- Pension and health cover
- Employer pension contribution and full health insurance in both the Netherlands and Portugal.
- €2,000 a year to learn
- Conferences, courses and books. The budget renews each January and needs no approval under €500.
- Twenty weeks parental leave
- Fully paid, whichever parent you are, with a phased return across the month after it.
- A month in the other city
- Flights and a flat covered, once a year, in whichever office is not your own.
Apply
Send it and we will read it.
A CV or a link is enough —no cover letter, no form with fourteen fields.Every application gets a reply from the hiring manager, including the ones that are a no.