Senior DevOps Engineer - Talent Pool

Mercell is looking for a Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer to help build the platform our engineering teams run on. You don’t solve a problem once for one team, you solve it for every team: reusable, measurable, secure by default. If you think in platforms rather than tickets, we’d like to meet you.

About Mercell

Mercell is the market leader in public procurement in Europe. We're revolutionizing how the public sector procures goods and services, helping buyers and suppliers connect in the most efficient, transparent, and easy way possible.

We are building a new SaaS platform that automates the entire tendering process, from publication to evaluation and final contract. This complex process involves a lot of API integrations, validations, and intricate steps that need to be handled seamlessly. Our core values Growth, Curiosity, Courage, and Trust guide everything we do, from our business decisions to how we collaborate and interact with our colleagues and customers. We are committed to fostering an environment where our employees can develop and thrive.

Your Mission

As Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer at Mercell, you build products for engineers, not one-off solutions. When a team asks for something, your first question is how to solve it once for everyone as a reusable module, a paved path, or a self-service capability. You treat the platform as a product: it has users, standards, a roadmap and adoption metrics.

You design before you build. Every implementation starts with a clear view of the trade-offs, the rollout steps and how success will be measured and it is built to still make sense when we have twice the accounts, twice the teams and a stricter audit.

What you'll do:

Platform engineering

• Architect and evolve a unified application platform that standardizes how teams build, deploy and operate services across Mercell.

• Build reusable building blocks Terraform modules, golden-path templates, self-service tooling and drive their adoption across teams.

Engineering approach

• Write short design proposals covering alternatives, trade-offs, phased rollout and rollback.

• Define success up front SLOs, cost, adoption, lead time and instrument it from day one.

• Think ahead: scale, multi-account growth, security review, operability and handover.

Cloud infrastructure & automation

• Design and run scalable, secure and highly available AWS infrastructure across a multi-account organisation, using Terraform with Terragrunt and CloudFormation with CDK.

CI/CD

• Design and improve GitHub Actions pipelines so that delivery is fast, safe and consistent with infrastructure changes reviewed as plans and applied through the pipeline only.

Security & compliance

• Build security into the platform by default: least-privilege access, organisation-level guardrails, vulnerability monitoring and compliance with industry standards.

Observability & incident response

• Build logging, monitoring and alerting that teams actually rely on, and take part in resolving and learning from incidents.

Cost & performance

• Find and deliver measurable improvements in cost efficiency, scalability and performance across our services and infrastructure.

AI-assisted engineering at scale

• Help roll out AI coding assistants such as Claude Code safely across our engineering organisation: shared configuration and standards, guardrails and permission models, secure access to credentials and infrastructure, auditability, and predictable, reviewable results for infrastructure-as-code changes.

Collaboration & knowledge sharing

• Work closely with development and security teams, set standards others can follow, and mentor engineers on DevOps and platform practices.

What you'll bring:

• Strong experience (ideally 5+ years) in DevOps, SRE or Platform Engineering roles, including at least 3 years with direct accountability for production AWS environments.

• A proven track record of building reusable infrastructure that other teams adopted shared modules, templates or self-service tooling. Be ready to walk us through one.

• Deep Terraform experience across many accounts: module design, versioning, state management and drift. Terragrunt and CloudFormation/CDK experience is a strong plus.

• Designed and maintained CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions (or GitLab CI/CD, AWS CodePipeline or similar), including pipelines for infrastructure changes.

• Designed multi-account AWS networking: VPC design, Transit Gateway or PrivateLink, DNS, and how they fit the security model.

• Applied AWS security in production: least privilege, organisation guardrails (SCPs, AWS Config, Security Hub) and a secure SDLC.

• Built observability with CloudWatch and related tooling: metrics, logs, traces, meaningful alerts and SLOs.

• Solid hands-on experience with containers and serverless: Docker, ECS or EKS, and Lambda.

Strongly nice to have:

• Experience with AI coding tools beyond personal use, for example defining team or organisation-wide standards, hardening agent permissions, governing tool and MCP access, or building review workflows for AI-generated changes.

• You can explain the reasoning behind your past decisions what you measured, which alternatives you rejected, and what you’d do differently.

Nice to have:

• Hands‑on experience with Azure we run one platform there, and you’ll help keep it aligned with our AWS standards.

• Strong programming or scripting skills in one or more languages (e.g. Python, Go, TypeScript).

• Background as a software engineer in a product team.

Location:

• Netherlands, Utrecht: Hybrid - working onsite at the office min. 3 days and from home, balancing flexibility with collaboration

Please note: Mercell does not provide relocation support for this position. We are seeking candidates who are already based in, or have existing work authorization for, the country where the role is located.

-Mercell is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and experiences.

-Mercell handles all personal data in line with GDPR and our Privacy Policy.

-Mercell does not provide relocation support. We are seeking candidates who are already based in, or have existing work authorization for, the country where the role is located.

-Mercell may carry out background checks on applicants to verify information that appears on CVs and other documentation. This background check is carried out by an external party and is not carried out without the consent of the applicant. Current applicants will receive further information about this.