Senior Python Backend Developer

📍 Amsterdam - Hybrid (minimum 50% at the office)

⏱️ 36-40 hours per week

💰 €4900 - €5600 per month

🌍 Futurewhiz is a B Corp

Just a small heads-up regarding logistics: we aren't able to offer visa sponsorship for this role, so we can only consider candidates who already hold a valid work permit for the Netherlands or the EU.

At Futurewhiz, we have one mission that unites us all:

Empowering every child to grow by shaping the future of personalized learning for the next generation.

Every day, we create digital learning products that challenge, motivate, and help children aged 3 to 18 grow. Futurewhiz is looking for a Senior Backend Developer! Do you want to help hundreds of thousands of children learn through play while ensuring responsible screen time? Then we are looking for you!

🏰 About Futurewhiz, Squla and StudyGo

For over 16 years, Futurewhiz has been the market leader in EdTech in the Netherlands. Our brands, including Squla and StudyGo, help children and teenagers aged 3 to 18 learn and grow at their own level and pace. Our mission is clear: "Empowering every child to grow." We've been a certified B Corp since 2020, which means we strive for a strong balance between purpose and profit.

Squla is a popular educational brand among (primary school) children, parents and teachers. Every day, more than 160,000 children at home and more than half a million children play the best games and quizzes at school in the classroom. Our mission? Helping children progress through play! We do this by staying close to children's experiences, and by using gaming elements, attractive UX designs and current, changing content.

StudyGo (formerly WRTS) is the go-to online platform for secondary school students to prepare for exams. From vocabulary practice and assignments to chatting with tutors and attending group lessons, we offer a comprehensive toolkit to help students succeed. With over 650,000 annual users, StudyGo has become one of the key digital platforms for secondary education.

🎮 What will you do?

As a Senior Backend Developer in our Primary Education team, you'll build Squla, the platform that helps hundreds of thousands of children learn through play every day, and you'll shape both its technical direction and the way our engineering team works. This is a role with real ownership, autonomy, and space for creativity. Your ideas and decisions will directly influence the product and how we build it.

AI is changing what senior engineering means, and we're changing with it. As coding agents handle more of the implementation, the leverage shifts to judgment: deciding what to build, designing systems that stay healthy, and shaping ways of working that let a whole team get more from AI without lowering the quality bar. That last part is genuinely yours to define here: how we use agents, what our guardrails look like, what good engineering means in this new mode. You'll combine hands-on development with technical leadership, mentoring, and architectural decision-making. If you've already rebuilt your own workflow around delegating to agents, this is a chance to do the same for a team.

🌟 Your role and impact

• Lead backend planning and technical decision-making together with the PM and your multidisciplinary team

• Define how we use AI in engineering: design workflows around agent delegation, parallel execution and review guardrails so the team gains speed without losing quality or accountability

• Own significant technical areas and stay accountable for technical quality, system health and maintainability over time

• Set up the guardrails, reviews and architecture that allow colleagues from other disciplines to contribute safely, including AI-assisted contributions headed for production

• Work broadly across the stack where it keeps momentum high: backend first, frontend, data and infrastructure when useful

• Take ownership of team results: you ship, measure whether it moved learning and business outcomes, and act on what you find

• Act as a technical mentor and sparring partner for the team

• Foster a strong engineering culture through code reviews, knowledge sharing, and collaboration

Our stack is:

• Python back-end

• React front-end

• AWS

🔥 Who are you?

You enjoy taking ownership, making technical decisions, and helping others grow. You thrive in an environment where your ideas matter, your expertise is trusted, and your work has visible impact. You're energized rather than threatened by how fast AI is changing engineering, and you want to help define what good looks like.

You bring:

• Solid experience as a Senior Backend Developer building production systems

• Strong Python experience and confidence owning technical decisions from idea to production and beyond

• You've made agent-driven development your daily reality: you delegate complete tasks to coding agents, often several in parallel, you know where they shine and where they quietly fail, and you have ideas about what a team-wide agentic workflow should look like

• Experience designing API-driven backend architectures and data modeling at scale, especially with relational databases like MySQL

• A deep understanding of software design patterns, automated testing, and clean code practices

• The judgment to balance speed against maintainability, security and technical risk

• Experience mentoring engineers and reviewing production-bound work from others

• Comfort working from goals and ambiguity in a multidisciplinary team

• Fluency in English, written and spoken

Nice to have:

• Hands-on experience with AWS or other cloud platforms

💰 What do we offer?

• 24 vacation days + 3 assigned days off + 1 skipping school day

• Collective pension and health insurance

• A €600 annual learning budget for your professional development

• Unlimited access to external coaches through Inuka Coaching

• Unlimited access to Goodhabitz training programs for professional and personal growth

Additionally:

• Lifetime access to StudyGo and Squla accounts

• Office next to Bijlmer Arena station (with the possibility of getting a Swapfiets or an OV business card if you live over 7km from the office)

• A MacBook for work

• Payroll Giving option to contribute to a good cause

• Healthy lunches at the office, unlimited good coffee, fresh fruit, and snacks

• A Culture Crew that organizes fun activities like outings, pub quizzes, ski trips, and laser tag

😻 Who are we?

We're a passionate and diverse team, brought together by a shared mission: helping children thrive in their learning journey, and empowering them to grow through personalised education.

Our culture is welcoming and authentic. We believe the best work happens when people can be themselves. Whether you're into book clubs, monthly socials, movie nights, cake-baking contests, Mario Kart showdowns, or ski trips, you'll find a community that feels like home. Here at Futurewhiz, there's something for everyone, and we can't wait to welcome you!

Our platforms are for everyone, and the same applies to our workplace.

The beauty lies in the diverse backgrounds, ideas, experiences, and perspectives of our people. This diversity enables us to help all young learners realize their educational potential, regardless of who they are, or who we are. At Futurewhiz, we actively embrace each other's differences, fostering an authentic environment where people can truly be themselves. This makes it easier for others to do the same. We're committed to nurturing a diverse and inclusive culture that starts here in our office and extends across all our platforms, and everyone is welcome on this journey.

🤖 Our use of AI

At Futurewhiz, we believe in fully embracing AI in our way of working.

AI is transforming our roles, and we'll shape this future together. We use AI to accelerate our mission: to move faster, go further, and improve our support to children, parents, and teachers.

Do you have any questions about AI and our use of it in the recruitment process? Send us a message to recruitment@futurewhiz.com

Will you be our new Senior Python Backend Developer?

We'd love to hear from you, even if you don't check every box! If you're excited about the role, just be yourself and go for it. We value diverse perspectives and are always curious to learn what makes you unique.

A quick tip: above all, just be yourself! We truly celebrate diversity in all our colleagues and are genuinely excited to hear your unique perspective.

Just a small heads-up regarding logistics: we aren't able to offer visa sponsorship for this role, so we can only consider candidates who already hold a valid work permit for the Netherlands or the EU.

Ready to join us? Simply upload your CV and a short motivation via the application button, and we'll be in touch soon. We can't wait to meet you!