Senior Backend Engineer, SaaS Tooling

TOPdesk; Delft; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 125,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working environment

10 to Grow programme

Job summary

TOPdesk is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for SaaS Tooling to design, build, and operate the lifecycle of TOPdesk SaaS instances across 10+ global datacenters.

You will focus on reliability, idempotent operations, and safe retries while evolving a distributed job-driven platform with AI-native tooling. Join Team Knoflook in a hybrid, Netherlands-based role.

Qualifications

• Senior backend engineering experience in Python.
• Experience building and operating production-scale backends.
• Experience with asynchronous job scheduling and idempotent operations.
• Designing and consuming HTTP APIs with OpenAPI specs.
• Strong SQL and relational database experience.
• Clear written communication for cross-team collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services for SaaS tooling across multiple datacenters.
• Ensure reliable job execution with safe retries and clear state transitions.
• Maintain stable HTTP APIs and accurate OpenAPI contracts.
• Improve tooling, observability, tests, metrics, and alerting for reliability.
• Collaborate with Hosting, SRE, DevEx, Support, and product teams.

Skills

Python

Backend engineering

Async job scheduling

HTTP APIs

OpenAPI specs

SQL

Job description

TOPdesk builds service management software used across education, healthcare, government, and manufacturing. We are 800+ colleagues in 11 offices worldwide. Founded over 30 years ago, we serve more than 10 million users worldwide and have been helping organisations deliver better services ever since.

We are an open, collaborative organization with little hierarchy - people own their work end to end and are trusted to make the decisions that matter. We are reinventing ITSM and ESM for the agentic era, building AI agents our customers can trust, and this role is part of that.

Job Description

About the role

As a Senior Backend Engineer for SaaS Tooling, you’ll build and operate the systems that manage the entire lifecycle of every TOPdesk SaaS instance. Every action - provisioning, upgrading, moving, restoring, or retiring environments is handled as a job through your team’s Tooling.

You bring experience scaling backend systems and help advance a distributed, job-driven platform. You focus on reliability: designing for safe retries, handling partial failures, and maintaining consistent state across services and datacenters.

You’re comfortable working in a codebase that’s evolving, with legacy and new systems running side by side. You enjoy migrating features gradually, ensuring no customers interuptions. You write clean, accessible code, and you actively use agent-based automation and AI-native tools to streamline development and operations.

Your product lane

You’ll join Team Knoflook, part of the Deploy, Run & Optimize lane - our CloudOps and DevOps function that keeps the SaaS platform running.

Deploy, Run & Optimize - how TOPdesk runs

This lane owns how TOPdesk operates: SaaS infrastructure and SRE, environment management, data persistence, observability, and DevOps/DevEx practices that ensure fast, safe delivery.

The team

Team Knoflook is a small, cross-functional team of cloud engineers, a tester, and a software architect. As a senior engineer you add depth in building and operating systems at scale, and you help spread knowledge across the team so every critical component has more than one owner.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate backend services that run customer instance lifecycle management across 10+ global datacenters.
• Make job execution resilient: ensure idempotent operations, safe retries, clear state transitions, and recovery paths for interrupted work.
• Design and maintain HTTP APIs between services, keeping specs accurate and contracts stable.
• Strengthen Tooling reliability and observability: implement tests, metrics, logging, and alerts to catch failures early.
• Automate repetitive operational tasks into self-service tools with clear fallback options.
• Share context and ownership across the team through reviews, pairing, and documentation - so no single person is a point of failure.
• Collaborate with Hosting, SRE, DevEx, Support, and product teams to support features and operations.
• Participate in L2/L3 support, including weekday, weekend, and occasional night on-call rotations.
• Bring AI-native ways of working - agents, subagents, and shared patterns - into how the team builds and operates the system.

Technical environment

• Backend: Mostly Python, with Go used for select services.
• Architecture: Distributed services that coordinate asynchronous jobs; each datacenter runs jobs in containers.
• APIs: HTTP services, all with OpenAPI specs.
• Platforms: Linux and Windows.
• Data: SQL on relational databases (MSSQL, Postgres, and others).
• Cloud: Azure Cloud.
• How we build: Claude Code is our primary AI-native SDLC tool; agent-based automation helps reduce manual work for the team.

Qualifications

Required

• Senior-level backend engineering experience in Python.
• Proven track record building and operating backend systems at production scale.
• Experience with asynchronous job scheduling and execution, including handling partial failures and understanding the importance of idempotency.
• Skilled in designing and consuming HTTP APIs, including maintaining accurate OpenAPI specs.
• Experience incrementally evolving or replacing live systems without disrupting users.
• Confident working with SQL and relational databases.
• Strong written communication skills for documenting designs and collaborating across teams.

Nice to have

• Production experience with both Python and Go.
• Experience building internal developer or operations tooling (Control Panels).
• Current, hands-on practice with AI-assisted or AI-native software delivery (Claude Code or equivalent).

Additional Information

What's in it for you

• A strong focus on personal development - including, in the Netherlands, our "10 to Grow" programme: 10% of your time and budget for your own growth.
• A hybrid working environment built on freedom, trust, and responsibility.
• An open, informal, and supportive culture, with collaboration across national borders.
• Excellent employment conditions.