Senior Software & Data Engineer

About the job Merlin Innovation is an AI consultancy building enterprise-grade, production-deployed applications for clients across a range of industries. Increasingly, these are AI-native products: LLM-powered features, retrieval pipelines (RAG), and agentic workflows running in production. As our Senior Software & Data engineer , you'll take broad technical ownership across the full software development lifecycle, from architecture and hands-on development through deployment, monitoring and scaling. What you'll do • Act as the technical partner to the client: translate business problems into solutions, shape scope, explain trade-offs • Own the architecture on client engagements: design the solution, then defend and refine it with the client's IT and security teams • Hands-on backend development through to production deployment • Design and build the data platform underneath: layered bronze/silver/gold architecture and reliable pipeline • Architect and integrate GenAI capabilities (LLM APIs, RAG, agentic components) into production applications with the engineering team • Help shape how Merlin builds, the standards, tooling and technology choices we adopt, and grow the engineers around you What you bring Must-haves: • Solid software engineering experience, with real depth on the backend • Experience owning architecture end to end and taking systems into production • Hands-on experience building or substantially working on a layered data platform (bronze/silver/gold) • Cloud experience: Azure is ideal, AWS or GCP transfers fine • Comfortable and credible in front of clients — you can convince a technical stakeholder you know what you're doing, and back it up • 4+ years of experience • Based in Belgium (or willing to relocate before joining) and legally authorized to work in Belgium. • Fluent English Strong pluses: • You took a GenAI project to production (an agent or a RAG system), running for real users • Experience leading or mentoring a team of engineers • Python, and API design at scale • Some frontend ability (TypeScript with React or Vue), enough to be dangerous, not necessarily a specialist • CI/CD and containerised deployment; Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions • Dutch or French