Principal Go Backend Developer
Utrecht, Netherlands
On site, 5 days per week, office first environment
The opportunity
Balanz Energy is looking for a Principal Go Backend Developer to help shape the backend architecture of a growing energy technology platform.
You will join a small engineering team building systems that support automated energy trading, renewable asset optimisation, forecasting, and market decision making. The work sits at the intersection of software engineering and the physical energy market, where system performance and decision quality have a direct commercial impact.
This is a hands on Principal role. You will remain close to the code while taking ownership of architectural decisions, technical standards, and the evolution of the platform.
About Balanz Energy
Balanz Energy is building infrastructure to help renewable energy providers operate their assets more intelligently.
As solar and wind generation continues to grow, energy production becomes increasingly dependent on weather conditions. Balanz Energy combines forecasting, market data, automated trading, and asset optimisation to help customers make better decisions in real time.
The company recently went live in the Dutch market and is building towards significant growth. This creates an opportunity to join at an early stage and have genuine influence over how the technology develops.
Engineering environment
The engineering team is intentionally small and highly autonomous, with approximately five developers expected by the end of the year.
The stack is evolving alongside the product and currently includes:
- Go as the primary backend language
- Python for machine learning workloads and scripting
- Kubernetes for infrastructure and orchestration
- PostgreSQL and ClickHouse for data storage and analytics
- Redis for caching and fast data access
- NATS JetStream for messaging and event driven communication
- Svelte on the frontend
AI assisted development is part of the team's normal workflow, with coding agents and other AI tooling used to accelerate development and reduce repetitive work.
The expectation is that engineers use these tools intelligently while retaining ownership of design, implementation, testing, and technical decisions.
What you will do
- Shape the architecture and technical direction of the backend platform
- Design and develop high performance services in Go
- Build systems capable of handling large volumes of market, weather, and asset data
- Make decisions around scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability
- Establish strong engineering practices around testing, observability, and system reliability
- Work closely with product and business stakeholders to translate requirements into practical technical solutions
- Mentor other engineers and raise the technical bar across the team
- Remain hands on with implementation while providing technical leadership beyond your own area of ownership
What Balanz Energy is looking for
You are an experienced backend engineer who enjoys solving complex problems and is comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy.
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Strong experience with Go, including concurrency and asynchronous processing
- Proven track record designing and scaling distributed backend systems
- Strong understanding of software architecture and engineering principles
- Comfortable making pragmatic architectural trade offs
- Able to communicate technical decisions clearly to both technical and non technical stakeholders
- Experience providing technical guidance or mentoring to other engineers
- Comfortable working in a small team where engineers have broad ownership
- A product oriented mindset and an interest in understanding the business impact of technical decisions
Nice to have:
- Experience in trading, fintech, energy, IoT, machine learning infrastructure, or another data intensive domain
- Experience with event driven or real time systems
- Experience with Kubernetes or cloud native infrastructure
- Professional experience with multiple programming languages
Team and culture
The team is direct, collaborative, and technically focused. Because of the complexity of the product and the early stage of the company, engineers work closely together and are expected to communicate openly and solve problems collectively.
- Small engineering team with significant autonomy
- Direct access to product and business stakeholders
- Strong focus on knowledge sharing and technical ownership
- Opportunity to influence the product and engineering direction as the company grows
Relocation and visa sponsorship
International candidates are welcome, and visa sponsorship can be arranged where required.
Relocation support is provided through Talcom Relocation and includes:
- Housing assistance
- Relocation logistics
- IND procedures
- Onboarding support
- Administrative setup in the Netherlands
Compensation and benefits
- Competitive salary
- Bonus structure
- Pension contribution
- 33 vacation and ADV days
- Travel reimbursement
- Visa sponsorship support
- Relocation assistance
Interview process
- Introductory conversation
- Technical architecture and whiteboard session
- Final culture and team discussion