Lead Backend Developer - Make an impact with a new platform for teachers

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

⏱️ 36-40 hours per week

💰 €5900 - €6900 per month

🌍 Futurewhiz is a B Corp

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 Lead Backend Developer! Do you want to help thousands of children learn through play while ensuring responsible screen time? Then we are looking for you!

🏰 About Futurewhiz, Squla and StudyGo

For nearly 15 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 to use 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.

🪄Our new platform

Every teacher wants to inspire their students with strong lessons and effective practice exercises. In reality, however, creating these takes a lot of time and energy. That’s why we put all our expertise and experience to work to support teachers, so they can focus on what truly matters: high-quality education.

Through our work, we contribute to our mission to help every child grow. You will become part of a driven and dedicated team with one clear focus: helping teachers develop lesson presentations, create practice materials, review student work, and everything that comes with it.

🎮 What will you do?

As a Lead Backend Developer, you’ll have a key role in shaping both the technical direction of our platform 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.

You’ll combine hands-on backend development with technical leadership, mentoring, and architectural decision-making.

🌟 Your role and impact

• Lead backend planning and technical decision-making together with the PO and other colleagues

• Have the freedom to propose, experiment with, and implement technical solutions that improve our platform

• Act as a technical mentor and sparring partner for the team, supporting colleagues in choosing the best approaches

• Take full responsibility for your features from the beginning to them going live, and beyond.

• Ensure scalability, security, performance, and maintainability across all backend services

• Contribute to architectural discussions and continuously improve our engineering practices.

• Work on systems that support experimentation, such as A/B testing and data-driven optimization

• Design and implement APIs, services, and data pipelines that enable marketing automation and personalization

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

Our stack is:

• Python back-end

• React front-end 

• Deployed on Google App Engine 

• Using MYSQL and Redis.

🔥 Who are you?

You enjoy taking ownership, making technical decisions, and helping others grow. You thrive in an agile environment where your ideas matter, your expertise is trusted, and your work has a visible impact.

You’re excited by the challenge of building scalable systems and shaping how they’re built, all while contributing to a mission that makes education better for children.

You bring:

• Solid experience as a Senior or Lead Backend Developer

• Confidence in owning technical decisions and guiding solutions from idea to production

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills; you enjoy untangling complexity

• Extensive experience designing and building API-driven backend architectures

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

• Hands-on experience with relational databases, especially MySQL, and data modeling at scale

• Fluency in English, written and spoken

• Curiosity and creativity to continuously improve systems, processes, and engineering standards

Nice to have (but not a must):

• Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS

💰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 Lead 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.

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!