Senior Backend Developer

Soil Capital is dedicated to regenerating over 10 million hectares of land by 2030, tackling environmental and food security challenges through regenerative and low-carbon agriculture. As a leader in this field, we pioneered Europe's first payment for ecosystem services program for farmers.

Through our certified program and platform, Soil Capital drives food and agriculture sector transformation. We partner with blue-chip organizations committed to environmental goals and supply chain resilience. These businesses purchase regenerative units, incentivizing farmers to measure and enhance their agricultural practices.

Our technology empowers farmers to efficiently and accurately measure farming practices and their farm's GHG balance. We then audit and certify this data to generate certificates, helping farmers identify key levers to accelerate regenerative practice adoption.

Over the past decade, Soil Capital has become a recognized thought leader and a catalyst for large-scale change in France, the U.K., and Belgium. We are now expanding our geographical reach and product offerings to support ambitious growth.

Interested in our history? You can watch the video of Chuck & Nico, our co-founders, here.

About The Role

The Soil Capital developer team is addressing two critical challenges: future-proofing our existing platform and evolving it into a robust, data-driven solution powered by AI capabilities.

Our current platform, initially built for immediate business value, features an aging architecture with two codebases, limited separation of concerns, and business rules spread across both stacks. We are actively migrating to a cleaner Node.js foundation, implementing Clean Architecture, Domain-Driven Design, bounded contexts, and event-driven patterns. This ensures a more testable and reliable core for our business-critical computations and supports future features, integrations, and data initiatives. Our focus is on refactoring core elements while simultaneously delivering select features and maintaining the existing codebase. The majority of your time will be dedicated to the new foundation, though effective contribution to the actively maintained existing codebase is also essential.

Moving forward, we aim to leverage primary farmer data to generate best-in-class insights, supporting the agricultural transition. The development team will collaborate closely with our data team to productize the scientific models developed for agricultural transition.

We are seeking a Senior Developer to be a key technical voice in this transformation. The ideal candidate will have experience with these architectural patterns, possess the judgment to apply them appropriately, and be familiar with applications that visualize and interact with large datasets and complex models.

What you'll do

Build and consolidate the new architectural foundation

• Design and implement bounded contexts, domain layers, and use cases within the Node.js codebase, aligning with Clean Architecture and Domain-Driven Design principles.
• Migrate critical business rules from our legacy PHP codebase to Node.js, emphasizing testability and correctness for calculations vital to our certifications and payments.
• Contribute to the normalized client-facing API, data model, and event-driven mechanisms that will support future internal and external integrations.

Support the development of data driven platform

• Collaborate with the Data and development teams to create cutting-edge data visualization and simulation tools.
• Productize, maintain, and evolve underlying data and AI models to power these tools.

Help consolidate our engineering practices

• Reinforce architectural and engineering practices (separation of concerns, dependency inversion, testing strategy, domain modeling) through code, code reviews, and design discussions.
• Provide concrete expertise in applying these patterns, demonstrating pragmatism in knowing when abstraction is genuinely valuable versus premature.
• Foster a technical culture where standards are elevated through example and communication, avoiding gatekeeping.
• Leverage AI-assisted coding tools, exercising judgment on when they accelerate work and taking ownership of all shipped code.

Keep the lights on, pragmatically

• Maintain and iterate on existing functionality in both Node.js and PHP/Laravel codebases as required by product or operational needs.
• Assist in triaging, prioritizing, and responding to urgent operations-driven requests while maintaining focus on long-term consolidation efforts.

Collaborate across the team

• Work closely with the Developer Lead, Product Manager, Product Designer, and the engineering team (currently 6 developers, a mix of mid-level and senior profiles).
• Participate in squad ceremonies and contribute to roadmap planning and technical decision-making.

What we're looking for

Experience & expertise

• 5+ years of professional software development experience, with significant backend development.
• Strong, hands-on experience with Node.js / TypeScript in production environments.
• Concrete, hands-on experience with several of the following: Clean Architecture (or Hexagonal / Onion), Domain-Driven Design, event-driven architecture, CQRS, dependency injection / inversion, separation of concerns.
• Experience with complex and large datasets, understanding performance, maintainability, and reliability considerations.
• Solid testing discipline (unit, integration, contract) and comprehension of how architectural choices impact testability.
• Comfortable working in a PHP / Laravel codebase, or confident in quickly becoming effective with it, as contributions to this part of our codebase are required.
• Basic understanding of React/TypeScript for investigation, debugging, and minor fixes at the frontend/backend interface (frontend development is not a primary expectation).
• Experience designing and implementing REST APIs; GraphQL experience is a plus.
• Familiarity with SQL databases and data modeling; NoSQL experience is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar), with a thoughtful understanding of their utility.

Mindset

• Pragmatic: Knows when to focus on details and when to ship, applying patterns judiciously and managing complexity effectively.
• Honest: Articulates trade-offs constructively and collaboratively to peers, product teams, and less experienced developers.
• Adaptable: Comfortable navigating both the existing codebase that sustains current operations and the new architecture driving future growth.
• Curious: Engages critically with AI tools and frameworks in engineering workflows, leveraging them thoughtfully without over-reliance.
• Team Player: Contributes to a collaborative and constructive team environment.

Nice to have

• Experience with n8n or similar workflow automation tools.
• Experience migrating from a monolith to a more modular or service-oriented architecture in a demanding production context.
• Interest in agriculture, climate, or carbon markets.

Languages

• English: Working proficiency (technical and business language).
• French: Conversational level (common among office colleagues).

Here’s what we offer:

At Soil Capital, we are committed to building a sustainable and regenerative food system, with farmers at the heart of this mission. Joining us offers the opportunity to advance your career in a mission-driven company, surrounded by passionate colleagues.

• Mission-driven career: Contribute to transforming farming and food sectors with a dedicated team.
• Flexible holidays policy: Take needed holidays, coordinating with your team and role demands.
• Health insurance with Alan for you and your family.
• Reimbursement for public transport to the office.
• Flexible remote work: Work remotely 2 days per week, with flexibility and team coordination.
• Excellent office in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (or potentially London or Paris offices), with hybrid remote work options.
• Company events and travels: Participate in quarterly company events and visit our Paris (France) and London (UK) offices.

Our Hiring Process

• First interview with Charlotte, People Specialist (30 minutes).
• Hiring lead interview with David, Developer Team Lead (45-minute deep dive).
• Technical case interview with David, Quentin (Head of Tech), and Sophie (Product Manager).
• Final call with Guillaume, COO (30 minutes).

Soil Capital is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, or disability.