Software Development Engineer (AI Modernization)

Role: Software Development Engineer (AI Modernization)

Contract: Via Randstad

Duration: 7 Months (Extension expected)

Innovation Engineering (IEN) partners with Business Units and Functions to accelerate innovation and enhance quality, aligning closely with product roadmaps and priorities. We provide a focused portfolio of digital innovation and system platforms that enable our Philips Businesses to scale innovation.

Your role:

We're looking for a hands-on engineer who gets stuff done by using AI coding tools to tackle legacy systems head-on. You'll spend most of your time digging into old code (think monoliths in Java, .NET, C++, ANSI-C), figuring out what it actually does, and using AI to help refactor, break it apart, and move pieces to modern setups—without blowing up production.

The goal isn't to play with shiny AI toys; it's to make modernization faster and less painful than the old manual way. You'll need good judgment to steer the AI, catch its mistakes, and deliver quality code that can be maintained.

Your responsibilities:

• Dive into legacy codebases to map out business logic, dependencies, and pain points—using AI tools to speed up analysis and suggestions.

• Apply incremental approaches like the Strangler Fig pattern: start small, extract one service or feature at a time, build wrappers/facades, and reroute traffic gradually.

• Use AI assistants (Copilot, Windsurf, Claude, Codex, etc.) to generate refactored code, write tests for undocumented parts, propose microservices breakdowns, or translate old patterns to cloud-native equivalents.

• Handle CI/CD conflicts, versioning, security reviews, and performance checks so nothing regresses.

• Work closely with product teams and architects to select the highest-impact areas first and review what the AI spits out.

• Share practical tips on prompting effectively and avoiding common pitfalls so the team can level up on this too.

Skills & experience required to perform this role:

• Solid hands-on coding in at least two modern languages (Java, Python, C#, C++, Rust, Go preferred) and comfort reading/editing legacy stuff.

• You are proficient in applying SOLID principles, TDD, BDD, and design & architecture patterns.

• Real experience doing legacy modernization—strangler migrations, incremental refactors, monolith-to-microservices work (not just theory).

• Proven track record using generative AI tools day-to-day for code tasks: explaining old code, suggesting refactors, generating tests, or automating translations.

• Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and basics like containers, event-driven patterns, CI/CD.

• Ability to spot when AI is hallucinating or suggesting bad ideas—and fix it.

• Proactive attitude: you experiment with new tools but always tie it back to shipping reliable results.

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with agent-style workflows or tools for automated decomposition.

• Background in automated testing or clean code habits in modernization projects.

• Experience in consulting or services where you modernize client systems under real constraints.