Senior Python Engineer

The Netherlands | Sept. 5, 2026

Report as Closed

Company: Rijksoverheid

Country: The Netherlands

Salary: $281,867 - $386,808

Type: Onsite

Employment: Full Time

Description:

Vacancy features

Location Utrecht Contract duration Temporary appointment with the prospect of permanent employment. Hours per week - 38 Monthly salary €4,867.00 - €6,679.00 Salary level Burger bowl IBBAD 11 - Burger bowl IBBAD 11 Level HBO Bachelor Field of expertise IT Vacancy number 80020 Employment ​Temporary appointment with the prospect of permanent appointment​ Job group Citizen

Job description

Working at the Ministry of Defense but not as a soldier?

If you choose a job at Defense, you choose socially relevant work. You really contribute to a safe Netherlands. In addition to approximately 53,000 professional soldiers and reservists, about 27,000 civilians also work for Defense. Do you want to contribute as a citizen in your own field to a professional defense organization and thus to peace and security at home and abroad?
 
With your expertise in software development, you help build IT solutions that are used daily by Defense employees and contribute to a safe and effective organization.

Eagle provides various services in the areas of search, translation, speech and AI. You can see it as an internal conversation-driven search engine (a kind of 'internal Google'). It helps employees make quick decisions based on linked internal data sources. A reliable AI response requires more than just a good prompt or a model call. As a Senior Python Engineer, you ensure that the underlying software is reliable, secure and scalable.

You are involved in, among other things:

• Build services: design typed, asynchronous Python APIs, workers, and event-driven integrations with explicit contracts and fault models.
• Make RAG reliable: preserve identity, security trimming, evidence and source identifications throughout the chain and validate structured model output.
• Robust design: apply bounded concurrency, backpressure, timeouts, idempotency, retry budgets and controlled degradation.
• Prove quality: automate tests and evaluations for source support, citation integrity, authorization isolation, security and performance.
• Improve together: achieve reproducible builds and privacy-aware telemetry with DevOps; conduct reviews and coach engineers.

You don't just work on code. You think about architecture, make technical choices and help determine how Eagle will further develop as a service.

Job requirements

You have a demonstrable HBO or WO working and thinking level, developed through training, work experience or a combination thereof. In addition, you recognize yourself in the core below.

• Senior Python experience: with mission-critical software in production and a strong foundation in modern Python.
• Service engineering: with production APIs, workers or event-driven systems and robust error handling.
• Test discipline: with unit, contract, integration and performance tests and automated quality gates in CI/CD.
• Secure by design: with identity, authentication, authorization, secrets, least privilege and privacy-conscious metrics, logs and traces.
• Relevant domain experience: with enterprise search, vector retrieval, RAG, model integration or a similar AI application.
• Technical leadership and growth mindset: you make choices easy to follow, coach through feedback and reviews and continue to actively test your assumptions.

You can clearly substantiate complex technical choices, work independently and know how to include colleagues and stakeholders in your solutions.

It's a bonus if you also bring the knowledge below:

• Experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, vector stores, embedding services or model/prompt gateways.
• Experience with permission-aware retrieval or authorization at the document or record level.
• Knowledge of OpenTelemetry, internal package sources, lockfiles, SBOM, provenance and artifact verification.

Employment conditions

Salary level Burger bowl IBBAD 11 - Burger bowl IBBAD 11 Salary description The mentioned salary is based on a full working week of 38 hours. Your classification is based on your work experience and educational background. Monthly salary €4,867.00 - €6,679.00 Employment Temporary appointment with the prospect of permanent employment Contract duration Temporary appointment with the prospect of permanent employment. Maximum number of hours per week 38    

Other employment conditions

• Defence attaches great importance to personal growth and has good study facilities, so you never stand still. You will be given plenty of space to develop yourself and grow.
• The classification depends on your education, knowledge and relevant work experience.
• In addition to your salary, you build up an IKB budget every month, which c

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