Lead Devops Engineer

Platform Engineering Baarn · Hybrid €85k - €95k New role Help us bring a 15-year-old Dutch software product up to the hosting standard a 2026 SaaS deserves. One office day a week in Baarn Omni-channel contact-center software for organisations that depend on reliable customer contact. Unexus builds UCS , an omni-channel contact-center platform used by Dutch housing corporations, municipalities, and other organizations that depend on reliable customer contact. We sell directly in the Netherlands and, increasingly, through a partner network across Europe. We're a profitable, 40-person company based in Baarn, managed by a leadership team that's been in this market a long time. The CTO (that's Ewoud, your hiring manager) started in spring 2026 with a clear mandate: modernize how we build and run the platform, while protecting the trust we've earned in the past decade. UCS: the platform you'll be running. UCS is a contact-center platform that runs the day-to-day customer contact for tens of organizations across the Netherlands and Europe. On a normal workday, agents at a housing corporation or municipality log into UCS, handle incoming calls and chats from the people they serve. Under the hood it's a long-lived .NET codebase on Azure, running as a multi-tenant service with real-time telephony (SIP) at its core. Some of it is a decade old; some of it was rewritten in .NET 8 last year. Azure-hosted service Today UCS runs on Windows Server VMs in Azure, deployed via PowerShell scripts, with monitoring stitched together over the years. It works, we serve customers reliably, but the way we run it has drifted behind what a modern SaaS team should accept. Where we want to get to over the next 18-36 months: We want VM configuration, network setup, and routine ops reproducible from code. Ansible is our current pick, as it fits the Windows-VM current reality of the platform. It's also new for us, so we're holding the choice loosely. If you've done this at our scale with something better, that's a conversation we want to have early. Observability we'd be proud of Centralised logs, traces, and metrics; one place to look when something is off, instead of three people who each know one tool. We've started with OpenTelemetry but most of the platform isn't there yet. Cloud is our own Azure tenant, where we serve customers directly. Private cloud is the path for our European partners, who deploy UCS into their own infrastructure for their local customers. On-premise is a genuinely open question. For some buyers, the right answer looks like a small, single-vm version of what we run in the cloud, and the challenge is to scale back without forking the product. We are a .NET shop, so heavily based on Microsoft tooling. Many of our clients like to reduce their dependency, and so do we. We might end up still choosing Azure for most of our clients, but we want viable alternatives for every part of our stack. Ironically this might be where not being fully cloud-native is actually being an advantage today. Part-time (4 days) is negotiable for the right candidate. Our customers run office hours, and so does the bulk of our work. Out-of-hours happens on two occasions: planned maintenance windows in the evening or early morning (that's part of the role, not a surprise), and a light on-call rotation for genuine incidents. Yes, we know zero-downtime deployments are a thing, but for now the complexity of draining SIP calls feels overkill for our office-hour clients. We however love to revisit this decision when we are further down the road. Work from wherever you focus best. We're a hybrid company. The team meets in the office once or twice a week (Thursdays are team day). The rest of the week, work from wherever you focus best. We're not interested in tracking your hours or your seat. The office is a short walk from Baarn station, so commuting by train from most of the Randstad is realistic. You'd be the first hire in a brand-new platform team. Reporting directly to Ewoud (CTO). You'd help shape it from the ground up. Over time it should grow to three or four people. Until then, here are the people you'd work with most closely: , who founded Unexus and was our technical director, now works as a distinguished engineer. He built most of what UCS is today and is staying on to transfer the knowledge that lives in his head into systems and people. You'd be one of the people he hands the hosting baton to. Coen leads the development team and owns the application platform. He wants to step back from hosting day-to-day, which is a big part of why this role exists. Wesley runs the Azure tenant day-to-day as our sysadmin, and you'd partner with him closely. The rest of the dev team on the application side: André, Anvina, Chanel, Georgiy, Heinrich, Henry, Kim, Pieter and Prity, an international bunch whose world you'd touch whenever the release process or observability changes. Must have: Azure and .NET-shop fluency Lets be honest: our platform is .NET on Azure and will be for the foreseeable future. You don't have to write C#, but you do have to be comfortable operating a .NET stack on Windows in Azure: IIS, Windows services, SQL Server, Azure networking, the lot. If your background is pure Linux/Kubernetes/Go this role will frustrate both of us. Ideally you have done it the complex way before and decided that is not for you. You reach for the off-the-shelf solution first and only build custom when there's a real reason. C#, Blazor frontend If you have strong opinions about any of the above, bring them. A real platform with real users Your work shows up in how municipalities and housing corporations serve their residents the next morning. Honest about where the platform is and what it'll take to fix it. Including 8% holiday pay, depending on experience. With an office in Baarn (Thursdays together). A laptop that doesn't make you sigh For conferences, courses, or books. CV optional: a paragraph and a link to anything you've built is fine. Mutual interest check with Ewoud, CTO. What the role is, what you're looking for, whether this is worth both our time. Bring an example from your past you can talk through honestly. Meet the team (60 min) Less about us evaluating you, more about you evaluating us. No, it's a modernization role. The platform runs reliably today, but the way we operate it is behind where a modern SaaS team should be: observability, deployment automation, secrets management. The job is to bring that up to 2026 standards. Will people still be using phones in five years? Tenants calling their housing corporation, residents calling their municipality, patients calling their healthcare provider. Voice is the channel people fall back to when chat fails them, when the situation is complicated, or when they're upset. Of course we ship AI as well. (our former Technical Director) is stepping back gradually and Coen (Manager Development) wants to step out of hosting day-to-day. You'd be picking up the baton from both, with their active support. We are growing the role, not backfilling a departure. Because we have tens of customer tenants, not thousands, and our workloads run office hours. Kubernetes would add operational complexity we don't get value back from at this scale. We'd rather invest that complexity budget in observability, security, and release automation. If that decision sounds wrong to you, we'd love to talk about it, but you'd be talking us into it, not the other way around. Customers run office hours, so a heavy 24/7 paging culture isn't where we're headed. But planned evening or early-morning maintenance windows are part of the role, and there's a light incident rotation. We'd want you to help shape what "light and fair" actually looks like. No. You need to be comfortable operating a .NET stack, but the application code stays with the development team. The CTO is, frankly, enthusiastic about them. We're not naive about where they break, but we expect engineers here to be using modern tools and to bring opinions about them. Not everyone in our team is fluent in Dutch, however on company level we haven't made the switch to English as of yet. Basic Dutch or a willingness to learn Dutch is a big pro. Drop your name and email and we'll take it from there. Ask Ewoud directly through .