Senior Software & Data Engineer
Summary
Senior role at an AI consultancy designing and building enterprise-grade applications, data platforms, and GenAI features. Responsibilities include backend development, architecture ownership, and client engagement using Python and Azure.
About the job
Merlin Innovation is an AI consultancy building enterprise-grade, production-deployed applications for clients across a range of industries. Increasingly, these are AI-native products: LLM-powered features, retrieval pipelines (RAG), and agentic workflows running in production.
As our Senior Software & Data engineer, you'll take broad technical ownership across the full software development lifecycle, from architecture and hands-on development through deployment, monitoring and scaling.
What you’ll do
- Act as the technical partner to the client: translate business problems into solutions, shape scope, explain trade-offs
- Own the architecture on client engagements: design the solution, then defend and refine it with the client's IT and security teams
- Hands-on backend development through to production deployment
- Design and build the data platform underneath: layered bronze/silver/gold architecture and reliable pipeline
- Architect and integrate GenAI capabilities (LLM APIs, RAG, agentic components) into production applications with the engineering team
- Help shape how Merlin builds, the standards, tooling and technology choices we adopt, and grow the engineers around you
What you bring
Must-haves:
- Solid software engineering experience, with real depth on the backend
- Experience owning architecture end to end and taking systems into production
- Hands-on experience building or substantially working on a layered data platform (bronze/silver/gold)
- Cloud experience: Azure is ideal, AWS or GCP transfers fine
- Comfortable and credible in front of clients — you can convince a technical stakeholder you know what you’re doing, and back it up
- 4+ years of experience
- Based in Belgium (or willing to relocate before joining) and legally authorized to work in Belgium.
- Fluent English
Strong pluses:
- You took a GenAI project to production (an agent or a RAG system), running for real users
- Experience leading or mentoring a team of engineers
- Python, and API design at scale
- Some frontend ability (TypeScript with React or Vue), enough to be dangerous, not necessarily a specialist
- CI/CD and containerised deployment; Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
- Dutch or French