About this role.
Polar is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to strengthen the reliability, scalability, and operational safety of its payments and billing platform. The role spans cloud infrastructure, distributed backend systems, observability, CI/CD, incident response, and infrastructure as code. This engineer will partner with product, risk, and legal stakeholders to translate regulatory and operational requirements into durable technical systems. The ideal candidate has 5–8+ years of SaaS or fintech engineering experience, strong SQL and API design skills, and hands-on experience operating high-reliability distributed systems. The position is remote-first for candidates located anywhere in Europe.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
5/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
4/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.
Sample interview questions
I would start with customer-critical journeys such as checkout, subscription changes, invoice generation, refunds, and payout processing. For each journey, I would define measurable indicators—availability, latency, correctness, and processing lag—then set SLOs based on customer impact and operational risk. I would connect error budgets to release decisions and ensure dashboards and alerts distinguish user-impacting failures from internal noise.
I would first establish the scope and customer impact, then use correlated logs, metrics, traces, request identifiers, and deployment history to narrow the failure path. I would compare successful and failed requests for common dependencies, payload characteristics, timing, and regional patterns. After mitigation, I would document the root cause, add targeted instrumentation or safeguards, and create follow-up work to prevent recurrence.
I use explicit state machines, idempotency keys, immutable audit records where appropriate, transactional boundaries, reconciliation processes, and careful handling of retries and out-of-order events. I make failure modes visible and design compensating actions rather than assuming every distributed operation is atomic. I also ensure access controls and change history support auditability and regulatory needs.
I would combine automated tests with progressive delivery techniques such as feature flags, canaries, staged rollouts, health checks, and rapid rollback paths. Every deployment should be observable through service-level metrics and business-critical signals, not only infrastructure health. I would also reduce manual steps through CI/CD automation and establish clear release ownership and incident procedures.
A strong answer would explain the customer or business urgency, identify the specific reliability risks, and describe a constrained implementation that safely delivered the immediate value. It should include safeguards such as feature flags, monitoring, validation, or a limited rollout, followed by a planned path to harden the architecture. The outcome should demonstrate sound judgment rather than treating speed and reliability as mutually exclusive.
Why Polar?
It’s never been easier to build, ship and scale software.
But it’s never been harder to monetize it.
Modern startups look fundamentally different than prior generations:
Smaller teams
Exponential revenue growth relative to headcount
Higher variability in costs (LLMs) requiring more frequent pricing iterations
Laser focused on product development and distribution
Delegating and automating everything that is boilerplate – be it in their codebase or business operations.
Exceptional billing primitives, APIs and SDKs are essential, but delightful integration is not enough.
Startups need a billing platform designed for their speed of iteration. Combining billing and analytics in one platform to offer customer- and feature unit economics in real-time. Offering built-in pricing and cost insights, simulations and optimizations while simultaneously handling international compliance, tax management, fraud prevention and more.
That’s Polar. We’re building the next standard for applied AI startups.
Join our small, talented and engineering-led team across Europe as we build the infrastructure powering the next generation of software companies.
We focus on shipping at high velocity to serve startup founders scale their businesses. Everything else is secondary.
Role & responsibilities: What you will do
We’re hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to architect and evolve the Polar platform – ensuring the system remains fast, resilient and operationally sound as we scale.
Polar operates as a merchant of record, meaning our platform sits directly in the critical path of global payments, billing infrastructure and financial workflows. Reliability, uptime and correctness are essential – while still maintaining the ability to move quickly and ship product improvements.
You’ll work across the platform, application and infrastructure layers that power Polar – from core infrastructure and observability, to shipping new core primitives that are used within the platform by our customers. In close partnership with the team, you’ll ensure the system scales to handle increasing traffic, architectural complexity and regulatory demands without compromising stability, performance or developer velocity.
This role is ideal for someone who loves to deal with both infrastructure and cloud components with reliability as a product requirement and scalability as an architectural discipline. As well as doing deep systems engineering experience with a passion for building reliable, scalable platforms and empowering engineering teams through strong abstractions and automation.
While this role focuses primarily on the foundational layers of our platform, we value engineers who are comfortable moving across the stack when needed to ship quickly and maintain momentum.
You’ll work with the team to:
Ensure Platform Reliability & Uptime: Design and evolve systems that maintain high availability, predictable performance and operational stability. Drive improvements in uptime, resilience and operational discipline as the system scales.
Engineer for Scale & Performance: Strengthen how our distributed services behave under load. Identify bottlenecks, optimize critical paths and design systems that scale with growing traffic and complexity.
Advance SRE & DevOps Practices: Embed reliability engineering practices across the platform – defining SLOs and SLIs, improving incident response, reducing operational toil and making production behavior measurable and actionable.
Evolve Cloud & Infrastructure Systems: Continuously evolve Polar’s infrastructure baseline and determine when the current stack needs to evolve. Improve infrastructure-as-code, environment management and operational safety mechanisms.
Strengthen Deployment & Operational Safety: Refine CI/CD systems, rollout strategies and rollback mechanisms to ensure changes are safe, observable, reversible and fast to deploy.
Improve Observability & Debuggability: Advance logging, metrics and tracing standards so engineers can quickly understand, debug and resolve issues in production.
Collaborate across Engineering, Risk & Legal: Work closely with product and infrastructure engineers, as well as risk and legal stakeholders, to translate evolving regulatory requirements into clear technical abstractions while maintaining long-term platform reliability and health.
What we’re looking for
Systems Thinking & Operating Mindset
Deep systems thinking: You anticipate failure modes, design for idempotency and consistency, and think carefully about how distributed systems behave in production.
Security- and compliance-aware engineering mindset: You build with auditability, principled access control and regulatory constraints as first-order design considerations.
End-to-end ownership: You are comfortable owning features from infrastructure and backend systems all the way to shipping functionality that powers the product. While this role focuses on platform layers, we value engineers willing to work across the stack when needed.
Strong product judgement: You know when to move fast while ensuring that correctness, auditability and long-term system integrity take precedence.
High-ownership collaboration: You thrive in small teams, collaborating closely across engineering to evolve the platform architecture and take shared responsibility for the long-term health of the system.
Technical Skills
Strong backend expertise – you design clear, durable APIs and build systems that are resilient under real-world load and edge cases.
Highly proficient in SQL and data modeling – you reason rigorously about long-term data correctness, performance and reliability across large datasets.
Strong production debugging and observability instincts with an ability to trace complex issues across services and understand how to prevent them in the future.
Experience building or operating distributed systems with strong reliability and operational requirements.
Experience
5-8+ years of engineering experience, building and scaling customer-facing SaaS or fintech products in a high-growth environment.
Experience in payments and billing infrastructure – subscription lifecycles, transaction orchestration, refunds/disputes, payouts and financial state management.
Nice-to-have: Open source contributions or side projects/apps to showcase.
What we offer
Meaningful ownership: Small team & large surface area. You’ll directly influence how the company and platform scale.
Product-driven culture: We build to empower the next generation of software companies – and operate with the same builder mindset internally.
Competitive compensation: Salary and equity aligned with the impact of the role.
Exceptional team: Work with highly talented team members distributed across Europe.
Remote-first environment: Work from anywhere in Europe, with a home office setup budget available.
Annual team offsites: As the team is spread across Europe, we gather in person at least once a year to collaborate, plan, and spend time.
Health Benefits: Comprehensive health coverage to support you and your family.
Parental leave: Paid parental leave aligned with the standards and regulations of your local jurisdiction.
How We Hire
Polar is a remote-first company, with team members across Europe, and our hiring process is fully remote via video calls and email.
Hiring Process
Application Review: We review your application and previous work.
Intro call: A short conversation with Birk (Founder and CEO) to learn more about you and give you a chance to learn more about Polar.
Take-home Assignment: A practical exercise designed to reflect the kind of problems you would work on in the role.
Assignment Review: We review your assignment and feedback together
Team Conversations: 2-3 video calls where you get the chance to meet future team members.
Offer 🎉
Reference Calls
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