Backend Engineer Engineering · Full-time · Amsterdam Apply →
Summary
Backend engineer owning Hermes — the auth, API, and event-driven backend (Postgres with RLS, oRPC, TypeScript) behind Odea, an AI-powered teaching and learning platform. Day to day: tenant roles/permissions, course and document services, and reliable integrations coordinated with Atlas for document and video processing.
The Mouseion holds a small, talent-dense team building AI powered software for teaching and learning. Our first product is Odea, so institutions can learn and teach with AI on terms they can stand behind. We particularly like people who are truth-seeking, passionate, and careful. We enjoy spirited debate, unusual ideas, and eccentric solutions.
About the role
This is Hermes and the surrounding backend: Postgres with RLS, oRPC, permissions, and the coordination with Atlas for document and video processing.
You will own the services that sit between product surfaces and infrastructure: auth, APIs, and the backend systems that power courses, documents, and AI workflows.
Odea is already in classrooms. Your work is what makes that possible at scale. You will build the systems every product surface depends on, and keep them reliable, well-abstracted, and ready for what comes next.
- Owning authentication and authorization: tenant context, roles, and the checks that must not drift.
- Powering course and document backends, optimizing for correctness and performance as AI features become central to teaching.
- Building durable integrations: LMS, storage, and event delivery with retry semantics and observability so they just work.
- Hardening the path from user action to model response, closing the loop on reliability.
- Keeping service contracts clear so other engineers can build on your work without copying invariants.
You may be a fit if
- You have experience building and operating critical backend services, especially auth, APIs, or event-driven systems.
- You have strong opinions on reliability and performance of multi-step systems.
- You care deeply about clean abstractions, well-defined contracts, and making it easy for others to build on your work.
- You have strong software engineering fundamentals and enjoy owning the full lifecycle of production services.
- Experience with OAuth, JWTs, RBAC, Postgres, or TypeScript services is a plus.
If there appears to be a fit, we will schedule a few short technical conversations. After that, a working session on a small project with the team.
- a description of a personal (side) project you are most proud of (max one page)
