Senior Software Engineer

Do you get energy from building a scalable platform that drives the international growth of Seeders? In the role of Senior Software Engineer you are the technical driving force of our platform. You take the lead in the engineering team, act as sparring partner to the CTO and ensure a flawless experience for our customers and colleagues.

---

Your role as Senior Software Engineer

At Seeders we are growing rapidly on an international scale. As Senior Software Engineer you will join our driven engineering team, which is jointly responsible for building and maintaining our platform, built in PHP/Laravel. The task of Development is to make Seeders work even more efficiently and to offer an excellent customer experience for the services our customers purchase.

In this you are the most experienced voice at the table. You not only write code yourself, you give direction, make difficult calls, guard the technical course and raise the level of the whole team. You prepare major technical decisions and present them, well-founded, to the CTO, with whom you jointly determine the architecture vision. In this you are a full-fledged sparring partner who also pushes back when that is needed.

In addition, you play a pivotal role in the growth of our team. We are expanding in the coming period, and you help decide who we hire, how they settle in and how quickly they make an independent impact.

Where you make an impact

• Technical leadership: You take the lead within the team. You break complex questions down into manageable pieces, guide colleagues in technical choices and are the point of contact for escalations. You ensure decisions are recorded and that everyone knows why we do things the way we do.

• Technical Architecture: In direct alignment with the CTO you determine the long-term architecture vision. You make well-considered choices for frameworks, integrations and infrastructure. You underpin those choices with trade-offs in cost, speed and maintainability.

• Product Development: You are end-to-end responsible for the realisation and implementation of new features within Seeders Studio. You translate designs into scalable, clean and reusable (PHP) code and safeguard quality through peer reviews and automated tests. For the most complex parts of the platform you take the lead.

• Standards, process and ways of working: You actively keep an eye on how we work. You establish coding standards, review agreements and AI skills, and ensure they are genuinely lived. You identify where our development process causes friction and come up with concrete improvement proposals. You shape, for example, the branching strategy and Git workflows.

• Team Growth: You play a key role in growing the team. You think along about team composition, conduct technical interviews, design the onboarding trajectory and guide mid-level and junior engineers in their development. You organise knowledge sharing in a structured way, for example through pairing, tech sessions and good documentation.

• Platform Operations: You are in control of the non-functional side of the platform, such as security, performance and availability. You set up monitoring tightly so disruptions are detected immediately, and you proactively steer towards lowering operational cloud and API costs. You resolve incoming tickets from our (internal) users quickly, and for recurring bugs or bottlenecks you come up with a structural solution rather than a patch.

• AI & Tooling: You set up our DevOps and developer tooling with the right tools such as Claude, Sentry and Git. You maximise the productivity of the team without compromising on quality, and you determine where AI is and is not the right choice.

Where we are heading

At Seeders we offer you the opportunity to ride along with our international success. We forge data, content and PR together into powerful means for online authority. Through our innovative platform, Seeders Studio, we develop advanced methods to, for example, streamline content purchasing. You literally build the engine behind this international expansion, and the team that keeps that engine running.

Your profile

To be successful in this role, we expect a number of important competencies:

• Leadership without stripes: You bring colleagues along on content and trust, not on hierarchy. You give clear feedback, dare to choose a direction when information is incomplete and take responsibility for the outcome.

• Ownership: You take 100% responsibility for your own work and for the bigger picture: platform uptime, tech debt and the technical quality of what the team delivers. You are the escalation point when things get tense.

• Proactive & Dynamic: You quickly adapt to new frameworks. You resolve complex bugs before they escalate, propose optimisations on your own initiative and anticipate future scalability needs.

• Commercial insight: You understand the business model of Seeders. You evaluate development tasks on the basis of ROI and their impact on business strategy and the customer, and you can explain that trade-off to non-technical colleagues.

• Tech-driven: You embrace the future. You use AI developer tools such as Claude daily to increase your productivity and take the lead in designing next-generation AI-automated workflows.

What you bring

• Extensive experience as a software engineer in a product environment, including several years in a leading or pioneering role within a team.

• In-depth experience with PHP, Laravel and PostgreSQL in production. You know the framework beyond the happy path: think of queues and background jobs, caching, migrations on a running platform and a mature testing strategy with Pest.

• Solid knowledge and skills in the area of API integrations with external systems

• Comfortable maintaining and upgrading an existing Laravel codebase, including tackling tech debt without bringing the business to a standstill.

• Demonstrable experience designing and further developing the architecture of a growing platform.

• Experience guiding other engineers: code reviews, mentorship, onboarding.

• Strong communication skills in Dutch and English, including towards non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and monitoring, and a sense of the costs that come with them.

---

What we offer

• A salary of €5,500 - €7,000 depending on experience and qualifications.

• A profit-sharing scheme of €4,000 per year.

• 30 holiday days based on a 40-hour working week.

• Pension accrual, where Seeders contributes 5% and you may decide how much you wish to contribute yourself.

• Reimbursement of €0.23 per kilometre for travel by car and 100% reimbursement of public transport costs.

• Flexible working hours.

• A job of 32-40 hours per week.

• Hybrid working from Zwolle or Amsterdam. Two days per week we see you in the office, and on the other days you decide where you work.

• A shared lunch in the office every day, plus regular (international) team activities and parties.

• Room for personal development, with plenty of training opportunities.

• Perks, such as company fitness, a lease bike scheme and exclusive discounts at our customers.