(Editor’s note: This post about careers at funded Dutch startups is part of the Tuesday Business Briefing, which includes the Tech Tuesday series and the EIndhoven Business Briefing.)
ICYMI, there’s a global war for talent going on as the tech sector grows exponentially. And with pandemic labor shortages, the leverage is shifting quickly in favor of highly skilled internationals. For this Tech Tuesday installment, we’re going to tell you about careers at Dutch startups and scale-ups that have raised serious capital recently, which is a great indication objective investors think they have terrific potential. Now, they have dozens of engineering jobs open and can afford top talent.
Who wouldn’t want to work with A players? These are all companies with which we’ve worked directly or where we know people currently working there who vouch for their corporate cultures.
Our featured company is JW Player. We told you about JW Player a couple of years ago … that founder Jeroen Wijering is planning for an IPO. Well, JW Player – founded in 2005 – just reached an important milestone on that journey, raising $100 million earlier this month from LLR Partners, a Philadelphia-based private equity firm.
This is also an important milestone for Eindhoven because homey Wijering is the guy who wrote the code that made YouTube possible, one more reason we see Eindhoven as Europe’s most influential tech hub. So, this is your chance to join the company that created foundational web technology. Of course, back when Jeroen started JW Player, there was little or no early stage investment capital in the Netherlands. So the company ended up going to New York for funding and now is headquartered there with American Harvard biz school grad Dave Otten as CEO. But Jeroen and his core team of developers remain in Eindhoven.
JW Player has an opening for a senior software engineer, and you can work in Eindhoven or the United Kingdom, though the benes are better in the Netherlands.
(Thanks to JW Player’s Anna Corsetti for the heads-up.)
The amazing thing about JW Player is that they’re even more employee-friendly than companies in The Valley.
So we’re going to start with the benefits for the Netherlands team, which include:
• 25 days of personal time off
• you get to take advantage of the Netherlands’ 30-percent tax ruling meant to cover the cost of relocating.
• you get parental leave (try that in the States).
• and you get a personal development budget.
That’s in addition to medical and pension.
Okay, that’s really just the beginning.
JW Player corporate culture includes:
• bi-annual hack weeks
• employee-led instruction on everything from deep learning to knitting
• AMA (Ask Me Anything) and Fireside chats with Executives & JW Player family
• a new-hire “International Buddy” program
Of course, you have to perform.
Here are the requirements:
- Contribute to the architecture of a production-scale service layer
- Build features for innovative products that help customers grow and monetize their
audience - Design and build scalable performant services supporting thousands of requests per
second - Work in a collaborative, cross-functional team that enjoys a high level of autonomy
- Code as part of a highly technical team in a fast paced, agile environment
- Prototype new ideas and explore new solutions to the growing list of problems the
platform solves - Participate in planning activities, code review, providing feedback and mentorship to your
peers - Lead the execution of major product initiatives
- Participate in bi-annual hackathons where you will have the opportunity to innovate with
engineers beyond your team
You have:
- 4-plus years of relevant experience
- proven track record of ownership of maintainable, stable and scalable software
- experience with microservices architecture: designing, creating, deploying, testing and
monitoring - an obsession with code quality. Whether it’s pure unit tests, integration tests or both, you
know you are responsible for your code working correctly and can easily validate this
with tests that can be hooked into a CI environment. - experience doing database design and RDBMS concepts
- strong understanding of source control management systems and you know your way
around Unix/Linux. - comfortable working in a Cloud environment, ideally AWS. The JW Player DevOps team
is available to help, but collaboration and understanding will help you too. - a collaborative mindside. There are multiple ways to engineer a solution, and a code review is a chance to share knowledge, not judge others’ code.
Bonus Points:
- Contribute to existing open-source projects as well as your own
- Experience with event-driven or message-driven architecture
- Knowledge of video encoding and/or streaming protocols
- Experience with web video
- Experience with Docker and/or Linux Containers
About JW Player:
JW Player pioneered video on the web more than a decade ago and remains the world’s largest network-independent platform for video delivery and intelligence. Media companies including Fox, VICE, Business Insider, and Univision, in addition to hundreds of thousands of creators of all types and sizes, rely on JW Player to deliver and monetize their content across all devices. JW Player’s massive global footprint of more than 2 billion unique devices creates a powerful data graph of unique consumer insights and generates billions of incremental video views. The company is headquartered in New York, with offices in London and Eindhoven, and was named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™ in 2018.
Accerion, based in Venlo
Accerion is a Venlo-based scale-up that, like JW Player, came out of Eindhoven, specifically the HighTechXL accelerator/venture builder. This company created proprietary positioning technology for mobile robots, and they need a senior software engineer.
Accerion got an A round in 2019 from Phoenix Contact Innovation Ventures, a Blomberg, Germany-based corporate venture capital investor and they have clients all over the world.
Full disclosure: Dispatches works directly with Accerion, so we can vouch for their corporate culture. First, they’re expat-friendly with staffers from Syria, South Africa, Turkey, Bulgaria and Canada. You can read more from employees about what it’s like to work at Accerion here and here.
The Senior Software Engineer will be responsible for developing and implementing advanced:
- robotics, pattern recognition and signal processing algorithms
- embedded database systems
- communication protocols
- high-performance, real-time and multi-threaded embedded applications
The ideal candidate has the following profile:
- a technical background (BSc/MSc).
- a “systems thinker,” able to understand and connect the dots of the whole system
- five or more years of relevant experience in the field of mobile robotics, computer vision and/or embedded systems and software.
- extensive experience with C++ is a must
- experience with Agile is a plus
- You are a pro-active problem solver who can work independently.
- You are able to communicate well with team members.
- You have a passion for technology (robotics, sensors, tinkering).
Accerion’s ideal team member gets excited about:
- adventure in a high-tech robotics company, as part of enthusiastic and driven team
- technical (hardware and software) challenges, creative solutions and cutting-edge technology
- building a unique product with great value for the industry with customers all over the world
- taking on different roles in the projects, learning new skills and continuously developing yourself. For example, their business developer has a background in engineering.
Send your CV to [email protected]
Quick hits:
Lightyear, Automotive Campus Helmond
Lightyear builds cars powered in part by embedded solar panels in the roofs. They’re a spinoff of Technical University of Eindhoven’s super-successful solar car team … and no startup currently has more openings. We count 83 currently on the Lightyear website. That’s because Lightyear raised $48 million via a Swiss family office to become what Silicon Canals has dubbed the “Dutch Tesla rival.” We don’t know if we’d go quite that far since Tesla has sold millions of units and Lightyear is still a ways from getting to market. But clearly, a lot of people see this as the right concept at the right time.
The majority of listings are for engineering talent.
Salvia BioElectronics, High Tech Campus Eindhoven
Salvia created technology to relieve migraines in the form of bioelectronic foils that can be inserted below the skin in a minimally invasive surgery. The company raised about $30 million in late 2020.
They have several engineering positions open. You can see them all here.
SmartPhotonics, High Tech Campus Eindhoven
SmartPhotonics is an independent pure-play foundry producing custom photonic components including computer chips for customers based on their designs. The company raised a €35 million C round in 2020.
They have several openings including for a vertical integration engineer.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.