Let me introduce myself…

Hi, I'm Ron, Operations Director at Nine Yards Agency. Due to my technical background, I've never lost my developer heart, and I play an active role in guiding the development team. Our company was founded with a clear mission: we want to get employees in the process industry to work efficiently and safely through innovative digital solutions. A noble but also significant challenge! That's why I'm looking for a senior backend developer who can act as a sparring partner, brainstorm technical solutions with me, and implement them. Are you ready to bridge the gap between me and the development team? Read on.

A small disclaimer upfront

We're busy developing cool products. Our website is still a work in progress, so you'll find all relevant information in this vacancy. It's a bit longer than you're used to, but don't let it intimidate you. Enjoy reading!

About the role

This year, we deliberately started with a small team of developers to ensure that we work purposefully and with a clear focus, rather than developing randomly. We've given ourselves time to carefully analyze and evaluate all opportunities so that we can be sure we're making the right choices. Now that we have our course clear, it's time to expand our development team!

As a Senior Backend Developer, you'll play a crucial role in further refining and developing our products. You'll be a sparring partner in product development and actively involved in (technical) decisions, while also contributing and elaborate your own ideas.

In this role, you'll mainly focus on development and may guide other developers with technical issues when needed. Do you have leadership experience? Fantastic. If not, but you aspire to grow into a role like a lead developer in the future? That's certainly possible but not required. There will always be room for developers who primarily focus on writing code.

If you want to grow with us in a dynamic organization and become part of our team of 'Yardies', keep reading. We'd love to tell you more about our product ENTER and the role you might fill.

About you

We're looking for someone with a true passion for development who loves a challenge and is always seeking the best digital solutions. What else is important for this role:

In-depth knowledge of the Laravel framework, its first-party ecosystem, and common third-party packages.
Extensive experience with PHP.
Extensive experience in designing and developing (RESTful) APIs.
You don't need to be a MySQL guru, but you understand how to efficiently design (relational) databases for performance and scalability.
Experience with automated tests like unit and feature tests.
Experience with version control systems; we use Git.
You speak and write Dutch fluently with a professional command of the English language.
You're available for a minimum of 32 hours per week.
Nice to have: experience setting up pipelines like Github Actions.
Nice to have: experience with High Availability (HA) clusters.
Nice to have: experience leading other developers. If you don't have leadership experience but have this ambition, we'd still love to see your application.

What we offer you

At Nine Yards, we believe in a strong focus on goals, ownership, teamwork, and mutual trust. Values that help us achieve our ambitious goals.

As a senior backend developer, you'll have the opportunity to play a central role in the future of Nine Yards Agency and its products. You'll have the freedom to share, develop, and realize your ideas. In addition to a pleasant, open working environment, we offer you:

A nice, modern workplace (with a garden) in the center of Maastricht.
Hybrid work: you can work from home, but we also like to see you in the office. It’s up to you.
A new MacBook.
Of course, a good pension plan, so you'll be comfortable in your old age too.
28 vacation days based on full-time employment.
A salary between €4,000 and €5,500 (full-time) based on your experience and final responsibilities.
8% holiday pay.
A cool bonus scheme.
Friendly, helpful, funny (should we go on?) colleagues.

About us

Nine Yards

Nine Yards is a rapidly growing scale-up offering innovative software solutions for the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0.

This new era brings plenty of opportunities, and we're fully committed to seizing them. Our goal? To become a leading player in Europe. We have a strong foundation thanks to the extensive network of our majority shareholder, who operates on 33 of the 70 chemical industrial parks in Europe. This has given us a promising start. Currently, over 47,000 people are already using our product ENTER, and more than 180,000 training sessions have been completed! And that's just the beginning...

The team

At Nine Yards Agency, we value dedication, initiative, teamwork, and yes, also fun and free time. As a young and energetic organization, we work hard every day to improve and expand our product. 'Actions speak louder than words', but in the South Limburg way ;)

As a team, we strive for continuous improvement of the product through iterative processes to deliver new and improved work. Call it agile, scrum, or give it another fancy name, but we keep it practical, without getting carried away with the many methodologies you've probably heard of.

We distinguish between two teams: the development team, which focuses on further developing our products, and the training team, which works closely with clients to create and improve all customized training.

What we’re building

Access, training and certification via ENTER

Our product ENTER, which was created in 2018 as an assignment for Sitech Services, is now responsible for access to the entire Chemelot site in Geleen. Everyone, from occasional visitors to permanent employees, has to do an ENTER training before they're allowed onto the site and have access to specific areas within the industrial site.

But there’s more than just access. A safe working environment starts with comprehensive training and certification of personnel. We ensure that the onboarding process is smooth and, above all, safe through our custom-made or standard digital training. Moreover, managers and contractors always have insight into the progress and availability of their team.

In addition to online training, our latest module allows managers to manage offline training in ENTER. Did you know we also offer VR training? And that we have an app that allows you to follow on-the-go training and always have your certification at hand? In short, ENTER is the digital training platform for the process industry. We'd love to tell you more about it, but take a look at the ENTER website in the meantime.

Our roadmap

We aim to get employees in the process industry working efficiently and safely through digital solutions. For now, we're doing this through our access and safety platform. With a sharp eye for the latest technologies and a focus on the ultimate user experience, we strive for a unique and innovative experience for our users.

We constantly seek opportunities in the market and work hard on developing new products. Imagine an AI-inspired safety tool that supports operational staff in their daily tasks, or a system that digitally transforms alerts during emergencies and evacuations. We'd love to tell you more about this during a meeting!

Tech stack

Currently, we operate under a monolithic architecture with reasonable code coverage. We're in the process of migrating certain components to separate repositories.
Our main stack consists of Laravel 10 and PHP 8.1 (soon upgrading to 11 and 8.3), Laravel Horizon, MySQL, and Redis.
A student dashboard developed in Vue 3 and a mobile app using React Native and Expo.
There's a portion of React responsible for playing a training session. We plan to rewrite the student dashboard in React soon and incorporate this part into it.
Furthermore, we utilize Typescript and Tailwind. Laravel Nova serves as our administrative interface, but we plan to replace it in the future.
The tools and services we use include Atlassian (Jira and Confluence), Slack, Cloudflare, Github, and Github Actions.
Hosting for the main components is provided by True in a High Availability (HA) cluster. We still use DigitalOcean's App Platform ourselves.

Our application process

Ready to kick things off? If this challenge excites you, we'd love to invite you for an introductory discussion! We've talked enough about ourselves and are eager to learn more about you.

If there's mutual interest, we'll invite you for a second interview to discuss the terms of employment and introduce you to the rest of the Yardies.