Freelance Backend Platform Engineer (Node.js / TypeScript / AWS)

Brookwood Recruitment Ltd; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 87,000 - 145,000; Full time

Job summary

Brookwood Recruitment Ltd in Amsterdam, Netherlands is seeking an experienced Backend Platform Engineer to design, build and scale a next-generation platform handling large volumes of business-critical data.

You will work in a hybrid model (2 days onsite per week) on cloud-native backend services, APIs and distributed systems using Node.js, TypeScript, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB and S3, with a strong emphasis on reliability and observability.

Qualifications

• Strong commercial experience with Node.js and TypeScript.
• Experience building backend APIs, microservices and distributed systems.
• Hands-on with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 and event-driven queues/workers.
• Owns software delivery from design through production.
• Strong testing mindset: unit, integration and contract testing.
• Nice-to-have: AI-assisted development tools knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, deploy, and operate scalable backend services end-to-end.
• Develop robust APIs and platform capabilities using Node.js and TypeScript.
• Build and maintain cloud-native solutions leveraging AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, queues, workers, and orchestration services.

Skills

Node.js

TypeScript

APIs & Microservices

Distributed systems

Cloud-native

AWS Lambda

DynamoDB

S3

Event-driven

Queues & workers

Monitoring & observability

Testing mindset

Tools

AWS Lambda

DynamoDB

S3

Monitoring tooling

Event-driven architectures

Queues & workers

Job description

Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Working Model: Hybrid (2 days onsite per week)

Rate: Up to €105 per hour + VAT

We're looking for an experienced Backend Platform Engineer to join a high-performing engineering team building and scaling a next-generation platform responsible for processing large volumes of business-critical data. This is an opportunity to work on complex distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and highly scalable backend services.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design, build, test, deploy, and operate scalable backend services end-to-end.
• Develop robust APIs and platform capabilities using Node.js and TypeScript.
• Build and maintain cloud-native solutions leveraging AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, queues, workers, and orchestration services.
• Drive engineering excellence through clean, maintainable, and testable code.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, observability, SLIs, SLOs, and production support processes.
• Design resilient systems using retries, idempotency, dead-letter queues, graceful degradation, and fault-tolerant patterns.
• Contribute to architecture discussions and system design decisions across a modern platform engineering environment.
• Contribute tand system design decisions across a modern platform engineering environment.
• Work within a collaborative multi-disciplinary engineering team focused on accelerating delivery and innovation.

What We're Looking For

• Strong commercial experience with Node.js and TypeScript.
• Experience building backend APIs, microservices, and distributed systems.
• Hands-on expertise with:
  • AWS Lambda
  • DynamoDB
  • S3
  • Event-driven architectures
  • Queues and workers
  • Monitoring and observability tooling
• Proven ability to independently own software delivery from design through production.
• Strong testing mindset with experience in unit, integration, and contract testing.
• Experience working with AI-assisted development tools, coding agents, or spec-driven development approaches is highly advantageous.

Nice to Have

• Feature flags and experimentation platforms
• API versioning and backward compatibility
• OpenSpec or similar agent-programming frameworks