Backend Engineer

Engineering · Amsterdam (hybrid) 

Inner Circle is a dating app for people who are done wasting time. Every member is screened thoroughly, so the profiles you see are people worth dating.

Deliver backend features that improve matchmaking, engagement and retention. You work from outcome-based stories: the team agrees on the result, and you own how to get there.

Build new Kotlin services and help extract functionality from the PHP monolith step by step, without disrupting the members who use the app every day.

Use AI and agentic tools such as Claude Code in your daily work. Give them clear specs and context, and review what they produce as critically as you would review a colleague’s code.

Write clean, testable code with automated tests, keep pull requests small, follow secure coding practices, and stay responsible for your code once it runs in production.

Reason through problems and ship solutions that are good enough. Recognise when something needs more care or optimisation, and ask for input when a decision is bigger than your part of the system.

• 3+ years of experience in backend engineering

• Proficiency in at least one typed backend language, such as Kotlin, Java, C#, Go, TypeScript or PHP

• Solid experience with APIs and relational databases, including query performance

• Understanding of systems design and software architecture, and the ability to reason about trade-offs

• You know why clean code matters and you apply it, with or without AI

• Experience writing automated tests and working with CI/CD

• Hands-on experience with AI coding tools, or a strong drive to learn agentic engineering practices

• Clear communication in English, both spoken and written (design docs, decision records, pull request descriptions)

• Experience with AWS

• Experience with event-driven systems or microservice architectures

• Familiarity with Domain-Driven Design or clean architecture

• Experience with Kotlin or the JVM

• Experience working in, and gradually migrating, a legacy codebase

• Curious, and keen to try new tools and ways of working

• Focused on outcomes rather than output

• Pragmatic: you know when good enough is good enough

• Comfortable asking questions and explaining your reasoning

• An authentic team player

Inner Circle is a dating app built on the contrarian belief: opposites don't attract. The best connections happen between people who already live life the same way. So we don't sell more options, or better odds. We sell relevance, people worth dating. Every member is screened, so effort and intention are in place before anyone gets in. And where every other app is built to keep you swiping, ours is built to get you off it, and onto a date with someone worth your time.