Software Architect at Keylane in Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands

We are looking for a Software Architect within Axon Product Development to shape the architecture of our SaaS platform as we build new functionality and improve existing systems. If you enjoy making technical decisions, guiding engineers and working in an agile team, we’d like to meet you!

Key about your role

As a Software Architect within Axon Product Development, you shape the technical direction of our software and help teams translate complex business needs into sustainable solutions. You work closely with software engineers, product owners, business analysts, test engineers and fellow architects to ensure that architectural decisions support both our customers’ needs and the long-term evolution of the Axon platform.

You take ownership of the architectural integrity of key areas of the product. You analyse complex challenges, identify dependencies and technical risks, and guide teams towards solutions that are scalable, secure, maintainable and fit for purpose. By combining insights from different disciplines and teams, you establish clear architectural direction while allowing teams sufficient autonomy in implementation.

You are a hands-on architect who remains close to software development. You support teams with solution design, review critical implementations and help resolve complex technical challenges. You document important decisions and their trade-offs, promote consistency across the platform and ensure that architectural principles are translated into practical engineering standards.

You balance short-term delivery needs with the long-term health of the product. This includes guiding modernisation initiatives, reducing technical debt and improving performance, reliability, testability, operability and developer experience. You communicate architectural choices clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders and help create alignment across Scrum teams and functional clusters.

We also embrace AI-assisted software engineering as part of our development lifecycle. As a Software Architect, you explore how tools such as Claude, ChatGPT and Codex can support architecture and engineering activities—from analysing requirements and exploring solution options to understanding complex codebases, documenting decisions, identifying risks and supporting implementation and review.

AI is an aid, not a substitute for architectural or engineering judgement. You critically assess AI-generated suggestions, validate their assumptions and implications, and remain accountable for the security, correctness, performance and maintainability of the resulting solutions. You also help teams adopt these tools responsibly and effectively.

As part of a large engineering community, you actively share knowledge, coach engineers and contribute to architectural practices across the organisation. You encourage experimentation, constructive technical debate and continuous improvement of our software, architecture and ways of working.

Key About Your Team

The Axon Product Development department consists of more than 120 colleagues, organised across 9 functional clusters, such as Claims, Contracts, Financials and Request, and 16 Scrum teams.

As architect you will be part of one of those clusters. In addition, as member of the Axon Architecture Community, you work closely with fellow architects and share responsibility for the overall architecture, technical coherence and sustainable evolution of the Axon product. Together, you establish architectural direction, align decisions across teams and continuously improve our architectural practices. You also collaborate with architects working on other Keylane products to align architectural principles, standards and strategic technology choices across the organisation.

Together, they extend Axon’s functionality and continuously improve the product, ensuring it evolves in line with the changing needs of insurance companies and continues to deliver lasting value to our customers and their policyholders.

In this environment, you collaborate across team and cluster boundaries. You help teams understand how their solutions fit into the wider platform and work with engineering and product stakeholders to maintain coherence while enabling continuous delivery.

Check out our blog posts and videos to see what it is like to work at Keylane.

About Keylane Property & Casualty

As a leading European supplier of robust, highly configurable and customer-centric SaaS platforms to the insurance industry, Keylane offers solutions that optimise today’s business processes, unburden our clients and empower them to become future-fit and agile.

We provide and implement continuous upgrades, ensuring that our customers can comply with the latest rules and regulations. Combined with our commitment to backwards compatibility, this makes us a reliable long-term partner, providing a platform that continues to deliver value as customer needs and technology evolve.

• You are passionate about software architecture and engineering and enjoy turning complex business and technical challenges into clear, sustainable solutions.
• You have substantial software-engineering experience and have contributed to the design and evolution of large, business-critical systems.
• You have a strong understanding of software-architecture principles, design patterns, modularity, integration patterns, APIs and data architecture. You stay up to date with technological developments and assess how they could benefit the organisation and its products.
• You combine strategic architectural thinking with a pragmatic, hands-on approach and are comfortable working closely with engineering teams and source code.
• You can evaluate architectural decisions in terms of scalability, performance, security, reliability, maintainability, testability and operational impact. You identify architectural risks, dependencies and technical debt and translate them into practical recommendations and achievable improvement plans.
• You have experience with large technical ecosystems and technologies such as Java, IntelliJ, Git, Gradle, Angular and Docker, as well as relational databases and SQL, including DB2 and PostgreSQL.
• You communicate complex technical subjects clearly, create alignment across disciplines and document architectural decisions—including their context, alternatives and trade-offs.
• You enjoy coaching engineers and providing architectural guidance within an Agile environment without unnecessarily limiting team autonomy.

Using AI

• You have used AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, GitHub Copilot or Cursor, in your work or your own projects. You can explain how you have used them to explore solutions, understand unfamiliar code, develop or improve code and tests, troubleshoot issues, or support code reviews.
• You understand how AI-assisted development fits into the broader software development lifecycle. You can guide coding assistants with clear requirements and context, including through reusable instructions, skills or agents where relevant.
• You critically review, test and debug AI-generated code. You can identify incorrect assumptions, security vulnerabilities and maintainability issues, and you remain accountable for the logic, architecture, quality and security of what you deliver.
• Experience with CI/CD practices and integrating AI-assisted development into those workflows is a plus.

*A Certificate of Conduct (VOG) and reference check are part of the application process.

*Each employee within Keylane must follow training on information security and irrespective to the role basic information security responsibilities apply

• Starting with a monthly gross salary for a junior candidate between €5,200 and € 7,000 (medior) and between €4,300 and € 6,200 (senior) based on 40 hours per week;

• 8% holiday allowance of your total gross salary;
• A profit share;
• A pension scheme, with the option to save extra;
• Travel reimbursement: Receive a mileage allowance of €0.23 per km or an NS Business Card, which can also be used for personal travel;
• 24 holiday days (with the option to buy extra) and 7 inclusion days, which can be exchanged with fixed Dutch national holidays, allowing you to take them when you like;
• Flexibility in working environment. As part of a hybrid working team, you will work partly from home and partly from the office. If you work in the office, a free lunch is waiting for you every day. If you work from home, you will receive a working from home allowance (€ 4 net per day) and internet allowance (€ 35 net per month);
• The possibility of working remotely from abroad for up to 2 months per year;
• The possibility to lease a bike through our bike leasing program;
• A one-year contract that, subject to satisfactory performance, will be converted into a permanent contract;
• The opportunity to develop yourself at our Academy through courses and training, both professionally and personally;
• A comprehensive vitality offer to help you stay healthy. Read more here;
• An active and fun community of ‘Keylaners’. We also have after work drinks at our in-house pub every Thursday.