Go Backend Engineer Utrecht

• Do you want to work on backend systems that run on millions of devices worldwide, where correctness, availability and security are not theoretical concerns but daily reality?
• Do you enjoy building new systems from the ground up, making fundamental design choices and shaping a codebase that will be used at global scale?
• And do you want to do this in a small, exceptionally senior engineering team where productivity is unusually high and engineering discussions operate at a very deep level?

• 6+ years of professional backend engineering experience
• Strong experience building and operating distributed systems
• Experience designing new backend systems or major components from scratch
• Solid programming experience in Go
• Comfort owning services across their full lifecycle, including production
• Strong engineering fundamentals around testing, reliability and performance
• Clear communication skills and a product-oriented mindset
• Nice to have, but not required:
• Experience with networking concepts (TCP/IP, routing, firewalls)
• Exposure to cryptography or security-sensitive systems
• Experience with cloud platforms, Kubernetes or modern observability tooling

• Salary between €85.000 and €105.000, depending on experience
• Company stock options, sharing directly in long-term success
• 25 vacation days
• Amazing office, next to the train station
• Flexible, 2 working from home days
• Choice of your own hardware
• Budget for training, conferences and continuous learning
• The rare opportunity to build new backend systems inside a product with massive global adoption
• A small, exceptionally senior team where productivity and impact are unusually high

Your employer: a small, deeply technical company with outsized global impact

Your employer is a highly technical product company in Utrecht building software that enables secure, decentralized networking across the internet. Their technology allows devices anywhere in the world to communicate directly with each other as if they were on the same local network.

What started as an open-source project has grown into a globally adopted platform, running on millions of machines in almost all countries. Despite this reach, the company remains intentionally small, with fewer than 50 people worldwide.

This combination is rare. A very small team operating software with massive global impact. Decisions are made quickly, engineers have real ownership, and individual contributions visibly shape the product.

The company is now expanding its engineering presence in Europe. The team in the Netherlands is relatively newand plays a key role in building new backend components and services that complement and extend the existing platform. Much is still open for discussion: architecture, boundaries, tooling and long-term design choices.

At the same time, you collaborate with an extremely senior engineering team. Many colleagues have decades of experience in distributed systems, networking and security. The level of focus and productivity is unusually high. When people say “small but powerful team”, this is what they mean.