Senior Software Engineer
TOPdesk builds service management software used across education, healthcare, government, and manufacturing. We are 800+ colleagues in 11 offices worldwide. Founded over 30 years ago, we serve more than 10 million users worldwide and have been helping organisations deliver better services ever since.
We are an open, collaborative organisation with little hierarchy - people own their work end to end and are trusted to make the decisions that matter. We are reinventing ITSM and ESM for the agentic era, building AI agents our customers can trust, and this role is part of that.
About the role
As a Senior Software Engineer, you deliver production work - including legacy modernisation - through agentic workflows, inside the teams setting the operating model for the rest of TOPdesk engineering.
The work is real and customer-facing: you'll build and modernise TOPdesk's Knowledge Base - expanding existing components, shipping new features, and improving the underlying technologies - for a service management platform used by millions of people every day. Some days that's an accessible, polished user interface; other days it's making the backend fast and reliable; often it's both across the stack.
You work with Claude Code as your primary collaborator: framing problems, orchestrating agents to build and modernise real product, and standing behind the verification. Working this way is the heart of the role, not an add-on.
What this is not: A traditional senior engineering role with optional AI tooling bolted on top. Building agentically is how the work gets done here.
The team
You join team Phoenix, one of the first teams adopting our AI-native SDLC, reporting to an Engineering Manager, proving it in production on real customer-facing systems. Phoenix is a cross-functional team spanning back-end, front-end, UX, testing, and product - you deliver alongside a UX designer and a Product Manager, and work with platform teams to get code to production.
Owns and evolves the Knowledge Base end to end, from UI to backend.
Ships legacy-modernisation and product work through agentic workflows.
Builds the shared prompt and agent libraries the wider org adopts.
What you'll do
Build agentically
Frame and decompose problems, orchestrate agents to implement them, and verify the result.
Build new agentic product capabilities, and modernise pieces of the legacy Java/MS SQL platform on the modern Python/TS/Vue/Azure stack.
Work with agents, stay accountable
Write implementation briefs and acceptance criteria before invoking agents.
Curate context aggressively - the right files, constraints, and invariants; lean on CLAUDE.md conventions, subagents, and MCP tools to scale beyond single-shot prompting.
Design verification before or alongside implementation: tests, runtime checks, migration validation, observability, and rollback planning - plus the evals that catch regressions automatically.
Handle agent permissions, context, secrets, and dependency changes with care, and keep agent-generated change sets small, understandable, and maintainable with reviewable evidence behind them.
Recognise when a plausible agent-generated solution is architecturally wrong, unsafe, or unnecessarily complex - and review agent-generated work before it merges. You own the outcome.
Raise the bar
Contribute reusable patterns, subagents, and evals to the shared libraries the wider org adopts.
Pair with colleagues to lift the team's overall capability - coaching is part of the job.
Technical environment
Claude Code is our current primary agentic engineering environment: agents may plan and execute within defined constraints and governed environments, while engineers stay accountable for problem framing, architecture, acceptance criteria, security, verification, and production outcomes. Agent-generated work is backed by automated tests, runtime checks, reviewable evidence, and risk-based human approval - we match deterministic automation, structured workflows, or agents to the nature and risk of the task rather than maximising autonomy for its own sake.
Legacy: Java, MS SQL, heritage architecture - being decomposed.
Modern: Python, TypeScript, Vue, Postgres, Azure, Kubernetes; cloud-native / service-oriented architecture; Terraform-managed infrastructure.
Mechanisms: subagents, MCP tool integrations, multi-agent workflows, and shared prompt, agent, and eval libraries.
Success in your first year
You have shipped meaningful product and modernisation work in production via agentic workflows.
Your team's cycle time, lead time, and defect rate are measurably better than the baseline.
You have contributed reusable patterns, subagents, or evals to the org-wide libraries.
Engineers around you build better in part because of how you work.
Required
Strong production engineer with current, daily, hands-on agentic delivery practice (Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, or equivalent).
Experience in at least one of: Python, TypeScript / Vue, Java, Postgres, Azure-hosted systems, Terraform.
Deep software-engineering judgement independent of any tool - strong testing instincts, comfort with operational concerns, and the ability to spot output that is plausible but architecturally wrong, unsafe, or unnecessarily complex.
Comfortable in ambiguity and inside legacy codebases; communicates well in writing.
Nice to have
Experience modernising or decomposing a heritage platform in production.
Reusable prompts, subagents, evals, or CLAUDE.md conventions you have built and shared with a team.
Hands-on with MCP tool integrations or building agent workflows beyond a single editor session.
Depth across multiple stacks rather than a single one.
Location
Delft (Netherlands) and Budapest (Hungary) - our two focus locations. Delft is TOPdesk's head office and Budapest is our largest international engineering hub. Both sit at the centre of this transformation, and we are equally happy for you to be based in either. Hybrid in both.
Kaiserslautern (Germany) - our third engineering hub. A strong option for the right candidate, on the same hybrid model.
Elsewhere in Europe considered for an exceptional candidate, with the explicit expectation of regular in-person presence at one of our hubs.
Expect periodic in-person time at whichever hub you anchor to.
What's in it for you
A strong focus on personal development - including, in the Netherlands, our “10 to Grow” programme: 10% of your time and budget for your own growth.
A hybrid working environment built on freedom, trust, and responsibility.
An open, informal, and supportive culture, with collaboration across national borders.
Excellent employment conditions.
Want to apply?
Does this sound like your next step? Apply with your CV and a short motivation letter via the application form. We would love to see how you actually work with agents - a brief, a workflow, or a change set you drove with Claude Code or an equivalent.