Software Engineer – Distributed Systems

About Tidalis
Do you want to contribute to safer seas and waterways while making the global maritime sector more efficient and sustainable? At Tidalis, we develop maritime software for traffic guidance, surveillance, and ship movement management, often integrating with radar, radio, cameras, and other sensors.

Your role
The Software Engineer designs, builds, operates, and evolves cloud-ready, containerized, distributed software systems that underpin the company’s maritime solutions, including Vessel Traffic Services (VTS), Coastal Surveillance, and Port Management Information Systems (PMIS). A defining aspect of this role is the active acquisition and application of maritime domain knowledge. Software Engineers are expected to continuously develop an understanding of maritime operations, user workflows, regulatory constraints, and safety-critical contexts, and to apply this knowledge when designing, implementing, and operating software systems. The Software Engineer spans the full software lifecycle and requires increasing levels of technical depth, autonomy, ownership, leadership, and domain mastery as engineers progress through job levels.

What You’ll Do

• Designs, implements, tests, and maintains high-quality software components and services using modern programming languages and frameworks, to ensure reliable and maintainable solutions.
• Builds containerized, cloud-native services aligned with microservices and event-driven architectural principles, to enable scalable and resilient deployment.
• Actively applies maritime domain knowledge (e.g. VTS operations, port workflows, situational awareness, real-time monitoring) when making design and implementation decisions, to ensure operational relevance.
• Translates operational maritime requirements into robust and scalable technical solutions, to align business, operational, and technical needs.
• Proactively builds and maintains knowledge of maritime operations, terminology, standards, and user contexts, to design software that reflects real-world use.
• Engages with Product Managers, Solution Consultants, domain experts, and customer-facing teams, and participates in customer sessions, demos, or incident reviews, to gain a deep understanding of operational scenarios.
• Applies engineering best practices, including code quality standards, test coverage, CI/CD pipelines, and observability (logging, metrics, tracing), to support reliable delivery and continuous improvement.
• Designs for reliability, latency, availability, and resilience in mission- and safety-critical systems, to ensure safe and continuous operations.
• Participates in incident analysis and operational improvement activities, to enhance system robustness and reduce recurrence.
• Takes ownership of assigned tasks, features, services, or systems, to ensure accountable delivery and operation.
• Balances technical excellence with domain correctness and operational fitness, to deliver solutions that are both technically sound and operationally effective.
• Owns, at senior job levels, complex subsystems or domains end-to-end, acts as a technical-domain bridge, and influences product and platform direction, to safeguard technical integrity and operational alignment.

What You Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages (e.g. Go, Java, Python, TypeScript).
• Experience with cloud-native development, containerization (Docker), and Kubernetes.
• Understanding of microservices, APIs, distributed systems, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and observability practices.
• Fluent in English both spoken and written (and local language where applicable).
• Prior maritime domain experience is preferred; structured learning and on-the-job domain acquisition are expected.

Distributed Systems Focus

• Solid understanding of distributed system fundamentals, including failure modes, partial failures, and consistency trade-offs (e.g. CAP theorem, strong vs. eventual consistency).
• Experience with distributed communication and coordination patterns, such as RPC and messaging, including ordering, idempotency, retries, backpressure, and delivery semantics.
• Experience designing and reasoning about distributed state and data, including partitioning, replication, leader-follower and quorum-based models, and handling replication lag and conflicts.
• Ability to design fault-tolerant and resilient systems using patterns such as timeouts, circuit breakers, bulkheads, and graceful degradation.

What We Offer

• You will work in an inspiring, enjoyable, and technically interesting environment.
• The salary is attractive and aligned with your work experience and education.
• Your individual choice budget (IKB) amounts to 13.15% of your salary and can be used for extra leave, additional pension savings, or paid out entirely.
• You receive 20 statutory vacation days per year, with the option to purchase 20 additional days through your IKB.
• The pension is premium-free, giving your net income a boost.
• You also receive an annual vitality allowance of €272.50 net.

Interested?
Send your CV and a motivation letter to jolijn.bos@tidalis.com and tell us why you’re the perfect fit for our team! If you have questions about the position, feel free to reach out. We look forward to hearing from you!