Staff Engineer, Platform

Flexport; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Catered lunches

Health insurance

Pension plan

Equity program

Commuting reimbursement

Parental leave

Vacation days 25

Employee assistance program

Job summary

Flexport in Amsterdam, Netherlands is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Platform team to own and evolve the developer platform powering Flexport engineering. You’ll build paved paths, CI/CD tooling, and artifact repositories; you’ll own GraphQL/gRPC ecosystem, IAM primitives, and container orchestration with Kubernetes and ECS.

You’ll work with cross-team stakeholders to ship platform-wide changes and improve DevX.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• Deep full-stack instincts across backend, frontend, and pipelines.
• Strong product instincts for internal users and developers.
• Experience with CI/CD systems and container orchestration.
• Hands-on with build tooling and multi-language ecosystems.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder alignment.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the developer platform powering Flexport engineering.
• Build paved paths and self-serve tooling to simplify developer work.
• Create and support CI/CD pipelines and build tooling.
• Own backend and frontend developer experience.
• Govern GraphQL and gRPC ecosystem, ensuring smooth middleware and schemas.
• Evolve IAM primitives for secure defaults.
• Showcase strong DevX metrics and user research with developers.
• Collaborate across teams to ship platform-wide changes.

Skills

10+ years software engineering

Full-stack instincts

Product instincts for internal users

CI/CD systems

Kubernetes

GraphQL

gRPC

Build tooling

Observability stack

Communication

Tools

Github Actions

Gradle

Bazel

npm/pnpm/bun

Go

Cargo

Artifactory

ECR

GitHub

Kubernetes

ECS

Openmetrics

Datadog

Job description

Staff Engineer, Platform — Amsterdam, Netherlands

At Flexport, we believe global trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make global commerce so easy there will be more of it. We’re shaping the future of a $10T industry with solutions powered by innovative technology and exceptional people. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries a year.

Staff Software Engineer: Platform

Every engineer at Flexport ships code that moves real freight across 112 countries. The faster and safer they can do that, the faster the world's supply chains move. The PSI (Platform, Security & Infrastructure) team makes this possible: we build the paved path and tooling that hundreds of engineers around the world rely on every day to ship.

This is not a role where you wait for tickets. You'll talk to engineers, dogfood our platform, and find the friction that’s slowing us down, and then design and ship the tools to remove that.

What You’ll Do

You'll own and evolve the developer platform that powers Flexport engineering. That means:

• Making the best paved paths and self-serve tooling possible that makes the right thing the easy thing, protected by guardrails but not locked gates.
• Creating and supporting developers with CI/CD pipelines (Buildkit, Github Actions), build tooling (Gradle, Bazel, npm/pnpm/bun, Go and Cargo) and artifact repositories (Artifactory, ECR, github).
• Owning and improving the backend and frontend developer experience.
• Acting as the steward of our GraphQL and gRPC ecosystem and make sure our middleware, federation and schema sharing, CLIs, codegen and servers and clients work smooth as butter.
• Evolving and integrating our IAM solutions and primitives so that everything is easy and secure by default.
• Making sure engineers can easily use and understand our container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS) and observability stack (Openmetrics, Datadog) that engineers rely on to run, understand and debug their services.
• Doing user research with developers: shadowing engineers, running interviews, and tracking DevX metrics so that what you build is grounded on data and not assumptions.
• Crossing organizational boundaries to align with product teams and ship changes that impact the whole engineering org.

You Should Have

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent building developer platforms, internal tooling, or core infrastructure that other engineers depend on.
• Deep full-stack instincts: you're equally comfortable in a backend service, a frontend build pipeline, a Kubernetes manifest, and a CI configuration.
• Strong product instincts applied to internal users: you treat engineers as customers, identify what's actually worth building, and measure whether it worked.
• Expertise and hands on experience with at least one of each: a CI/CD system (Github Actions pref), a container orchestrator (Kubernetes pref.), build tooling preferably for more than one language, backend-for-frontend (Graphql pref.), service-to-service communication (gRPC preferred), Metrics and artifact storage.
• An appetite to take a shovel to that brown field: you thrive on fixing what’s broken and building bridges to what’s next. You don’t just throw migrations over the wall, you either execute them yourself or make sure they feel effortless.
• An independent mindset: you thrive in ambiguity, find the highest-leverage problems yourself, and don't wait to be told what to do.
• Excellent communication: you can run a developer interview, write a clear design doc, and align stakeholders across teams to land platform-wide changes.
• A generally helpful attitude. Everyone should know you within no-time as the person who gets stuff unblocked, points them in the right direction and makes their work easier. The 90’s can keep their BOFH.
• A drive for impact: you are not satisfying until every engineer is productive and confident thanks to your team.

Nice to Have

• Experience in data-driven DevX development using metrics such as DORA.
• Experience with AWS.
• Experience in Identity and Access Management (IAM) at scale such as JWTs, OIDC and fine-grained authorization.
• Experience with Terraform.

How We Work

• We come to the office 3 times a week to hang out, whiteboard, and ship together.
• We have the latest hardware and software, including frontier AI models on day one.
• We're agile, but not dogmatic. Teams decide how they work best.

Why This Role Is Special

• Massive leverage: every improvement you ship is multiplied across hundreds of engineers and thousands of deploys a day.
• Full ownership: from developer research to production rollout to measuring impact, it's yours.
• You shape the paved path: the conventions you set and decisions you make become how Flexport engineering builds for years to come.

What's in it for you:

• An opportunity to contribute to one of the fastest-growing companies, where you’ll have the chance to create a global impact while being a thriving multinational environment.
• Daily catered lunches incl. vegetarian options, breakfast, snacks and soft drinks available in our office on daily basis.
• Commute expenses: Flexport will cover home-office commuting costs for employees living outside of Amsterdam.
• 25 working days as vacation days based on full time employment.
• Health insurance: Flexport offers a collective health insurance plan including a basic package and any available additional packages. Your monthly premium is fully paid by Flexport.
• A defined pension contribution scheme.
• Equity program: every team member becomes a shareholder, aligning our success with yours. As a private company in a multi-trillion dollar industry, you have a direct stake in our collective growth and success.
• Employee Assistance Program through Aetna Resources for Living: Flexport provides an employer-sponsored program at no cost to you and your household members.
• Parental leave benefit: Flexport is here to support you and your families in one of the most important times in life – the birth of a child! Our parental leave program allows both mothers and partners to take time off from work for pregnancy, childbirth, and to bond with your new child.