Lead Engineer

Let your career roar as a Lead Engineer at Lionsville

You are the engineer who turns an architecture into running software — and the one other engineers look to when a decision has to be made today, not next sprint. A small senior team, a real operational system, and short lines to the people who decide, so an idea becomes something running rather than something scheduled.

What will you do?

You join a small, senior team building an operational decision-support platform from first commit to first delivery. Not a maintenance seat and not a pure architecture seat: you write the code, you set the bar, and you hold the whole system in your head.

You are an AI maestro

Writing the code is largely your agent's job. Yours is making sure the specs carry what the customer actually asked for, and that the agent has the context and the skills to deliver it. If you run out of tokens, ask for more — we would rather pay for the best tools than watch you type.

You design, build and ship

Event ingestion, the domain model, the planning loop, packaging, the operator interface — from first design through to production. You make deliberate architecture choices rather than inheriting them, and you own them once they are running. The team is small, so breadth is the job: you move to wherever the risk is that week.

You work across diverse software stacks

Microservices and cloud-agnostic architectures. Various cloud platforms — the major providers, and equally on-premises and European ones — various databases, SQL and NoSQL, and other systems integrated through APIs and event-driven solutions. Which of those a project uses is a decision rather than a default, and you will be part of making it.

You translate the business problem into a design

You are a substantive sparring partner for engineers, product owners and the customer's own people. You sit close to the operation, make complexity manageable, and turn a messy real-world problem into something buildable. Much of the value in this seat is created before any code is written.

You set the bar and hold it

Code review, work breakdown, and the standards the codebase is held to — including what "reviewed" means when an agent wrote the first draft. You take responsibility for performance, security and reliability. You deputise for the architect within defined bounds, so nobody is blocked waiting on one person, and you bring new colleagues up to speed in an unfamiliar operational domain.

About Lionsville

We build software that runs real operations — maritime navigation, logistics hubs, critical infrastructure. A business tech boutique: we take on enterprise-critical problems from strategy through to execution, in small senior teams close to the customer. We work as a pride: we back each other, we say what we think, and we finish what we start.

What you bring to the pride

• Ownership, a bias to solutions, and clear communication. You can hold a technical line with a customer's own IT organisation and stay easy to work with
• Strong software architecture capability. You will act as deputy architect: conscious
  choices about performance, security and maintainability, written down and defended. With it,
  the instinct to build the simplest thing that works and the judgement to say early that a design
  will not hold
• Deep backend engineering, with the architecture and API design expertise behind it. The
  language matters less than the depth: someone who has shipped end to end in more than one
  ecosystem is worth more here than a specialist in any single stack
• Experience working agentically with AI — not curiosity about it, but a way of working you
  already have, and opinions about where it breaks down
• Complex data-model design. The domain is genuinely intricate, and a weak model shows up
  months later as a wrong answer on somebody's screen
• A codebase owned from empty repository to production, with sound judgement about
  real-time and event-driven data — state, idempotency, replay
• Mentoring, and running code review as a conversation rather than a gate
• Living in the Randstad and comfortable with occasional travel to customer sites, including
  the occasional night shift when the operation has to be seen running. The work runs on
  English; Dutch is welcome, not require
  

What we offer

• A gross monthly salary between €6.700,- and €8.200,-
• Electric lease car or mobility allowance
• MacBook or Windows laptop
• Claude Code premium seat
• 25 vacation days and 8% holiday pay per year
• €4.000,- training budget per year
• An inspiring workplace at the Titaan (The Hague)
• Fun outings ranging from culinary delights, social and sporty activities to a family day