Senior Backend Developer

Soil Capital; Louvain-la-Neuve; On-site; EUR 50,000 - 60,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Remote work

Office in Louvain-la-Neuve

Company events

Job summary

Soil Capital is seeking a Senior Developer to drive a data-driven platform overhaul, migrating core rules from PHP to Node.js and structuring the system using Clean Architecture and Domain-Driven Design. You will work on scalable APIs, data models, and event-driven patterns while collaborating with a data team to productise AI-enabled insights.

The role blends hands-on development with shaping engineering practices in a hybrid setup based in Belgium, with potential remote work and strong

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, backend focus.
• Strong hands-on experience with Node.js/TypeScript in production.
• Experience with Clean Architecture, DDD, event-driven architecture and CQRS.
• Familiarity with REST APIs; GraphQL is a plus.
• SQL databases and data modeling; NoSQL is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement bounded contexts, domain layers and use cases on the Node codebase.
• Migrate critical business rules from legacy PHP code to Node with emphasis on testability.
• Contribute to API, data model and event-driven mechanisms for future integrations.
• Collaborate with data team to productise science and models for AI-enabled insights.
• Maintain and evolve architecture and engineering practices across the team.

Skills

Node.js/TypeScript

Domain-Driven Design

REST APIs

SQL databases

NoSQL

AI-assisted tools

Tools

PHP/Laravel

React/TypeScript

Job description

Soil Capital is on a mission to regenerate over 10 million hectares of land by 2030, addressing our environmental and food security challenges through regenerative and low-carbon agriculture. As a leading expert in this field, we have developed the first payment for ecosystem services program for farmers in Europe.

Through our certified programme and our platform, Soil Capital leads the food and ag sector transformation by engaging with blue chip organisations who seek to deliver on their environmental commitments and build supply chain resilience. These business purchase regenerative units, acting as an incentive for farmers to measure and earning improve their agricultural practices.

Our technology supports farmers by allowing them to efficiently and accurately measure farming practices, as well as the GHG balance of their farm which we then audit and certify to generate certificates. This helps farmers understand the levers to accelerate their adoption of regenerative practices.

In the past ten years, Soil Capital has established as a thought leader and a driver of change at scale in France, the U.K. and Belgium. Pursuing its ambitious growth trajectory, it is now expanding geographical and product scopes.

Interesting to learn more about our history? You can watch the video of Chuck & Nico, our co-founders, here.

About The Role

The Soil Capital developer team is currently facing two interesting challenges: future-proofing our current platform and transforming it into a strong data-driven solution, backed by AI capabilities.

Our existing platform was built with focus on providing immediate business value, but the existing architecture is showing its age: two codebases, thin separation of concerns, and business rules spread across both stacks.

We are in the process of migrating to a cleaner foundation on Node.js, applying Clean Architecture, Domain-Driven Design, bounded contexts, and event-driven patterns to ensure a more testable and trustworthy core for our business-critical computations, and to support the next wave of features, integrations and data work we have in front of us. We are focusing on on refactoring core elements in parallel with shipping select features and maintaining the existing codebase in line with business needs. Most of your time will be spent on the new foundation; the existing codebase is still actively maintained, and being effective there is also part of the role.

Going forward, we want to leverage the primary data collected from farmers to generate the best-in-class insights to support the agricultural transition. The development team will be working closely with our data team to productise the science and models they have developed around agricultural transition.

We are looking for a Senior Developer who can be a credible technical voice on this trajectory: someone who has experience with these patterns, knows when to apply them and - just as importantly - when not to, and who is familiar with applications that visualise and interact with large data sets and complex models.

What you'll do

Build and consolidate the new architectural foundation

• Design and implement bounded contexts, domain layers and use cases on the Node codebase, in line with the Clean Architecture and DDD direction the team is taking.
• Migrate critical business rules from our legacy PHP codebase to Node, with a strong focus on testability and correctness. These are the calculations our certifications and payments depend on.
• Contribute to the normalized client facing API, data model, and the event-driven mechanisms that will underpin future internal and external integrations.

Support the development of data driven platform

• Work with the Data and development team to develop state-of-the art data visualisation & simulation tools.
• Productise, maintain and evolve underlying data and AI models to support these tools.

Help consolidate our engineering practices

• Reinforce the architectural and engineering practices we are putting in place (separation of concerns, dependency inversion, testing strategy, domain modeling) through code, code review and design discussions.
• Beyond theoretical knowledge, bring concrete expertise in using these patterns. Pragmatism matters: knowing when something is genuinely worth abstracting and when it's premature.
• Contribute to a technical culture where the bar rises through example and communication, not through gatekeeping.
• AI-assisted coding is part of how we work, and team members are expected to leverage it. As with architecture patterns, what matters is judgment: knowing when it accelerates the work and when it doesn't, and owning what you ship regardless of how it was written.

Keep the lights on, pragmatically

• Maintain and iterate on existing functionality in both the Node and PHP/Laravel codebases when product or operational needs require it.
• Help triage, prioritize, and respond to urgent operations-driven requests without losing sight of the longer-term consolidation work.

Collaborate across the team

• Work closely with the Developer Lead, Product Manager, Product Designer and the rest of the engineering team (currently 6 developers, a mix of mid-level and senior profiles).
• Participate in squad ceremonies and contribute to the roadmap and technical decision-making.

What we're looking for

Experience & expertise

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, with a meaningful portion in backend development roles.
• Strong, hands-on experience with Node.js / TypeScript in production.
• Concrete, hands-on experience with several of the following: Clean Architecture (or Hexagonal / Onion), Domain-Driven Design, event-driven architecture, CQRS, dependency injection / inversion, separation of concerns.
• Experience working with complex and large datasets, with an understanding of what makes them performant, maintainable and reliable.
• Solid testing discipline (unit, integration, contract) and an understanding of how architecture choices affect testability.
• Comfortable working in a PHP / Laravel codebase, or confident that you can be effective with it if required. Part of our codebase still lives there, and contributing to it is part of the job.
• Basic understanding of React/TypeScript, enough to investigate, debug and make small fixes where frontend and backend meet. For clarity, we are not expecting you to be a frontend developer.
• Experience designing and implementing REST APIs; GraphQL experience is a plus.
• Familiarity with SQL databases and data modeling; experience with NoSQL is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar), with a thoughtful sense of where they help and where they don't.

Mindset

• Pragmatic. You know when to niggle and when to ship. You don't apply patterns for their own sake and know how to manage complexity.
• Honest about trade-offs and able to articulate them, to peers, to product, and to less experienced developers, in a constructive and collaborative way.
• Comfortable being exposed to two realities: the existing codebase that still pays the bills, and the new architecture which will support our future.
• Curious. We encourage thoughtful use of AI tools and frameworks in our engineering workflow, expecting engineers to engage with it critically without ignoring or over-trusting it.
• A genuine team player. The team is collaborative and constructive, and we want to keep it that way.

Nice to have

• Experience with n8n or similar workflow automation tools.
• Experience migrating from a monolith toward a more modular or service-oriented architecture in a real, demanding production context.
• Interest in agriculture, climate, or carbon markets.

Languages

• English - working proficiency - the technical and business language used throughout Soil Capital.
• French - conversational level - the language used most between office colleagues.

Here's what we offer:

• A mission-driven career: Join a company on a mission to transform the farming & food sectors, with a team driven by and committed to our mission
• Flexible holidays policy: Take the holidays you need, while coordinating with your team and respecting the demands of your role
• Health insurance with Alan for you and your family
• Reimbursement if you come to the office by public transport
• Flexible remote work: You can work remotely 2 days per week, with flexibility, provided you coordinate with your colleagues
• An excellent office in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (or possibly our offices of London or Paris), and the ability to work remotely on a hybrid basis
• Company events and travels: Join quarterly company events and visit our offices in Paris (France) and London (UK)
• Gross salary in the range of EUR 50 to 60k, depending on your type of employment.

Our Hiring Process

1. First interview with Charlotte, People Specialist, during 30 minutes
2. Hiring lead interview with David, Developer Team Lead, for a 45-minute deep dive discussion
3. Technical case interview with David, Quentin (Head of Tech) and Sophie (Product Manager)
4. Last call with Guillaume, COO, during 30 minutes

Soil Capital is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage applications from all candidates who meet the job requirements, regardless of their race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, or disability.