Senior Backend Data Engineer at NOWATCH

Company Description

NOWATCH is an Amsterdam-based health innovation company for the curious. By blending cutting-edge technology with the leading science around mental health, we explore the frontiers of wellbeing. The NOWATCH Awareable is our flagship product, and the first step on our journey towards helping people recover from stress quickly and enjoy more meaningful lives – because Time is NOW.

NOWATCH pioneers in the wearable market with new algorithms and sensors. Our hardware and software solution is part of a large and growing wearable industry. NOWATCH is backed by strong investors with teams in Amsterdam (NL), Oulu (Finland), Santa Barbara (USA), Djapur (INDIA). For more information, visit www.nowatch.com.

Job Description

We're searching for a passionate and talented Senior Backend Developer to design, develop, and maintain our core infrastructure, ensuring it’s robust, highly available, and capable of processing large volumes of sensitive health data daily while adhering to strict compliance standards (e.g., HIPAA/GDPR). This role operates with a privacy-by-design mindset, meaning security and compliance are inherent parts of the architecture, not afterthoughts.

Key Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and enhance Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to automate application build, test, and deployment processes.

• Design, build, and optimise high performing and scalable microservices and APIs (REST, gRPC) to ingest, process, and serve data across our applications.

• Lead the development and maintenance of high-throughput data pipelines (ETL/ELT) using modern streaming and batch processing frameworks (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Flink).

• Architect and implement robust data security measures, including advanced encryption (in transit and at rest), anonymisation techniques, access control lists, and audit logging to ensure strict adherence to all relevant health data privacy regulations.

• Select, configure, and optimise data stores (relational, NoSQL, data warehouses) to meet the diverse needs of real-time tracking, analytical reporting, and long-term historical storage.

• Implement comprehensive automated monitoring, alerting, and logging strategies to maintain platform stability, performance, and operational excellence using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools.

• Mentor mid-level engineers, driving best practices, and participating actively in code reviews and architecture discussions.

Qualifications

• Over 3 years of professional experience in Backend or Full-Stack Development, with at least 1 year focused specifically on large-scale data engineering projects.

• Expert proficiency in Python

• Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Deep experience with message queuing and stream processing platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kinesis) and big data processing frameworks (Apache Spark, Flink, or similar).

• Strong operational knowledge of AWS, including managed services for computing, database, and data warehousing.

• Expertise in performance tuning and schema design for both relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases (Cassandra, DynamoDB, MongoDB).

• Demonstrated experience in applying data privacy principles (e.g., encryption, tokenization, PII handling) and a solid understanding of regulatory frameworks like HIPAA, and GDPR.

Good to have

• Experience within the Health-Tech, FinTech, or another highly regulated industry.

• Practical experience building features leveraging machine learning/AI models using production data pipelines.

• Contributions to open-source data engineering projects.

What we offer

• Work experience in a global Startup Tech company with room for personal development

• The chance to be part of a young and ambitious team of internationals

• A broad scope of responsibilities through which you can learn and expand your skill set

• Apple MacBook

• NOWATCH of choice

• Flexible working hours

• Location of Amsterdam with ability to work partly from home

• Great team, culture and place to work with quarterly team days

WE AND YOU

We are a small team of very enthusiastic, hard-working people. We go at the speed of trust and make our own rules to create the best possible environment for our team. You'll definitely fit in if you have a hands-on and positive approach, think outside your own department, and wanna join our movement in helping people get more from each moment in life.