Help us bring a 15-year-old Dutch software product up to the hosting standard a 2026 SaaS deserves.
Who we are
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. Our customers expect the phone to work. So do we.
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.
What we are shipping
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. AI features are landing in stages.
Your challenge
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. That gap is the job.
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.
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.
UCS isn't a single deployment. 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 want the same primitives to work across all three deployments.
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.
Work-life balance and on-call
This is a senior, autonomous role. We trust you to manage your time. We expect you to actually take vacation. 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 for our office-hour clients. We however love to revisit this decision when we are further down the road.
Hybrid, based in Baarn
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.
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:
Bert, 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: Andre, Anvina, Chanel, Georgiy, Heinrich, Henry, Kim, Pieter and Prity, an international bunch whose world you'd touch whenever the release process or observability changes.
Wesley
Sysadmin
You bring
You've run production systems that customers depend on not in theory, in practice. You've been on-call, you've written the post-mortem, you've watched a bad deploy and brought it back to life. You know the difference between "the dashboard is green" and "the system is healthy", and you care about the latter.
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.
You like to keeps things simple. Ideally you have done it the complex way before and decided that is not for you. Boring is the new sexy to you.
You reach for the off-the-shelf solution first and only build custom when there's a real reason.
Tech stack
If you have strong opinions about any of the above, bring them. We hired you for them.
We offer
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. No theatre.
Including 8% holiday pay, depending on experience.
And the option to buy more.
With an office in Baarn (Thursdays together).
For conferences, courses, or books.
The process
Leave your email and we'll get in touch. 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.
On operations and architecture. Bring an example from your past you can talk through honestly. We'll do the same. We want to hear your opinions.
Less about us evaluating you, more about you evaluating us. Bring questions.
We discuss comp, start date, and any open questions. If we say no, we'll tell you why.
F.A.Q.
We're real people, in a real company, serving real clients. What we care about is: can you do this work, will you treat our team with respect, and will you be honest with us when something is wrong?
We hire from a wider range of backgrounds than the average .NET shop. You don't have to look like the rest of the team to belong on it.
Ready to talk? Drop your name and email and we'll take it from there.
Not sure if you're the right fit? Send it anyway. We'd rather have a 20-minute call and figure that out together than miss someone good because the job description didn't land.
Got it, we'll be in touch!
Keep an eye on your inbox, we'll send a few questions your way shortly.
Recruiters and agencies: please don't. We're hiring this one ourselves.
About the role of Lead DevOps Engineer?
Ask Ewoud directly through lead-devops-engineer@unexus.nl.