AI Software Engineer

About the role

Ghent, Belgium · Office-first · Full-time · Start: as soon as possible

We are looking for a senior full-stack engineer to take full ownership of the NextSDS product. You will ship to clients every week, work AI-first, and answer to no one but the founders.

About NextSDS

Companies that handle chemicals carry a heavy compliance load. Every chemical product comes with a Safety Data Sheet, the document that sets out what is in it and how to handle it safely, and a typical company has thousands of them to keep accurate as regulations change. Most teams still manage this with spreadsheets and outside consultants, and many still fail audits.

NextSDS removes that burden. Clients send in their safety data sheets, and the platform organises them, keeps them current against the regulations that apply, flags restricted substances and regulatory changes, and produces the safety and risk documentation that used to be prepared by hand. The hard part is underneath: every supplier writes a sheet differently and every country reads the rules differently, and turning that fragmented data into something clean enough to drive guidance is a long-term R&D effort, not a feature to be finished.

We are a seed-stage company in Ghent, founded in 2024, backed by KBC Start it and imec.istart, and we recently closed a €1M round to execute this plan. The codebase is built by three senior founder developers on solid foundations: CI, GitHub, database backups and collaborative programming, each founder owning an area while working across the whole application.

We are hiring because customer growth has outpaced the founders’ capacity to ship, and we need someone to own the part they can no longer keep up with.

What you will do

The first months are about the product. You will own the client-facing application end-to-end, optimise and harden it, fix what needs fixing, and ship features weekly that make HSE and regulatory teams’ work easier. AI tools such as Claude Code and Cursor are how the team builds.

The role then grows. Within six months you will hold full ownership of the client-facing side, so the founders are no longer the constraint on shipping, and start contributing to one or two R&D tracks on the regulatory engine. You will also talk to clients directly through an open feedback line, which is how the team learns and improves the product.

What we are looking for

• A senior full-stack engineer, 5+ years in production
• Fluent, daily use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot
• Strong TypeScript on both sides: frontend (React, Astro or similar) and backend (Node, edge runtimes)
• Strong across databases, APIs and modern cloud infrastructure
• You measure progress in deployed value, you own what you ship, and you value client impact over elegant code
• Argue for the tools you want to use, then ship with them
• Curiosity for the regulatory data underneath: REACH, CLP, supplier-formatted PDFs and the variant real-world inputs the platform turns into clean structured data
• Useful here: Python, LLM APIs, agent frameworks, document AI

This is a first hire. You will set scope alongside the founders, own what reaches clients, and answer for it.

Why join NextSDS

This is a team of builders. The constant is delivering value to clients every week, with no layer between you and the founders.

• We hire our first people the way late founders join: meaningful equity (ESOP) on top of a real base salary, not company cars or perks
• Direct collaboration with the founding team on roadmap, product and architecture
• We work together in the room, in Ghent
• Work that decides how well companies across Europe keep people safe around chemicals

Hiring process

Two steps:

• An informal conversation with the founders
• A case followed by a one-hour deep dive

Interested?

Tell us about yourself and mention this role. We will respond within a few days.