You build it, you run it, you love IT

Creating the retail tech platform of tomorrow

About bol and our tech

For over 13 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium, bol is their go-to online shop. On our platform, they can find over 36 million products. These items are not just offered by bol but primarily by our 51,000 partners: entrepreneurs who work together with bol to reach their customers. Together we aim to create the best online retail tech platform for our customers and partners, giving them a personal and inspiring experience. To achieve that goal we research, innovate, experiment and build. Every day.

To our customers, bol might seem just a website, an app and a parcel on their doormat. But at the scale we operate, you may already be imagining: it is much more. It’s about hundreds of different applications, each providing a clear capability. Together they form our tech retail platform. Tech impacts the whole process, from assets on the virtual shelves to items in the shopping baskets, from products in the warehouse to parcels at the front door. Altogether we run millions of lines of code in a modern microservices architecture, all created by our tech professionals. Furthermore, we do not just write code, we also experiment. We research data, and together with other disciplines we are continuously discovering ways to improve our products.

Want to know more about projects at bol?

Experimentation platform

From solving customer problems to getting your team to adopt new processes, experimentation is not always easy.

Payments project

Let the team tell you about our Payments project. What is it? How does it work? And who is in the team?

Offer Highway project part 1

Let the team tell you about our Offer Highway project. What is it? How does it work? And who is in the team?

Offer Highway project part 2

Let the team tell you about our Offer Highway project. And why they love working at bol.

Unique tech perspectives

At bol, we believe that your unique viewpoint is the key to tackling tech challenges and staying ahead of the game. How this translates to the work floor? We invite you to check out our video series, offering an exclusive peek into our dynamic IT and Product projects. Find out how our teams collaborate, ideate and execute projects, while maintaining a competitive edge in everything we do. Exploring our teams’ unique perspectives on the latest tech projects.

We have for 5+ PetaByte of (big!) data to experiment with

Tech bol.com

Join us to shape the future - in the cloud

The biggest challenge we’re continuously facing is scale. Scale in terms of customers, products, teams, applications, microservices, lines of code and partners. Everything we do must enable us to learn fast and consistently bring new ideas to our products. This way we can keep up with the growing demand for online shopping, the fast and ever-changing market as well as our expanding organisation.

One significant change we are making is moving all our applications and data to the cloud. This is an exciting opportunity as it allows us to innovate even faster. And by using cloud managed services, we have a more flexible and stable infrastructure.

This change impacts the whole organisation because tech is a crucial enabler for bol. We’re involved in every part of the process. Collectively, we keep it together, and you can be part of that.

Tech in numbers

7,000 incoming requests per second
100+ production changes per day
750 tech professionals
5,000+ terabytes of (big!) data

You build it, you run it, you love IT

That is our motto. At bol, our tech professionals build software using our skills, creativity and cutting edge technology. We ensure our systems run 24/7, dealing with peaks of 7000 customer requests per second during the holidays. We always strive to build the best for our customers. And together with other disciplines in our product teams we keep on iterating and learning to improve the things we make. As a tech professional: you build it, you run it, you love IT. At bol, tech is a core asset of our organisation and product teams.

All 150+ innovation teams work autonomously. Our tech stack is expansive – we use Google cloud platform, Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, React, and much more. But you and your team decide what works for you. Want to implement a new technology that can do a better job? Go ahead and prove the case. When and how you do your job is up to you and your colleagues. We trust you to do what works best for your product.

We believe in continuous improvement. That’s why, for example, our data scientists are part of our product teams and are always analyzing data. Together with engineers they build machine learning applications and make recommendations to improve our businesses and products. Over the last 20 years, bol has grown massively and continues to evolve, which means it is essential to build high-quality tech products continuously.

Using cloud managed services will allow us to innovate even faster

Grow and let the knowledge flow

As a product organisation, we have to make sure that knowledge flows between teams. We empower people to learn and grow to make them successful. We set up conferences and enable people to follow training and workshops. We encourage people to inspire each other and keep learning new things. Therefore we maintain strong communities and organise events, such as hackathons, datathons, and other knowledge sharing meetings. These are great opportunities to build on each other’s ideas and spot new opportunities. If you want to grow, this is the place for you.

Our biggest event is the Spaces Summit. It’s an annual conference with internal and external speakers, who discuss new technologies, fun experiments and exciting challenges within the organisation.

Hello world

The bol headquarters are located in the centre of the Netherlands, Utrecht, and we also work from Antwerp and Waalwijk. We have colleagues from over 55 nationalities working side by side in our offices. Together, we cultivate a welcoming, inclusive culture in which you can be 100% you.

To make new international colleagues feel at home, we help with your move to the Netherlands and do our utmost to get you up and running in no time. We created a buddy system to help you out during the first weeks. From getting around the bol campus to finding the best pancakes in town: your buddy will help you out.

At bol , we are working towards a hybrid way of working. You’ll work with your team on campus, as well as being able to work from the comfort of your home office. We embrace the flexibility of remote work whilst maintaining the team spirit that is so important to everybody at bol.

Change people’s lives in a positive direction.

Patrick Sengers

Tech Recruiter