Senior Backend Engineer

About Polarsteps

We're an Amsterdam-based team of 23 (and counting) with 10+ nationalities amongst us – a varied bunch of “Citizens of The World” with a range of cool skills and hundreds of thousands of kilometers under our travel belts. We also have something important in common (other than our very well-worn passports): We want to change the way people travel.

And that's exactly what we're doing, with the travel app to plan, track, and remember trips in a smart and beautiful way. Polarsteps has over 3 million users already, but, for us, this is just the start. You see, there are amazing new features on our roadmap, and we need even more talented & ambitious people to help us on our journey.

Position

Engineering at Polarsteps

If you haven't seen our app yet, go ahead and check it out – you'll see that we care (a lot) about providing a seamless, top-quality user experience for every one of our travelers. In fact, everyone – from our CEO to our support team – really strives for excellence throughout our whole funnel. For a backend engineer this really creates the possibility to craft the things you implement to perfection (with a whole company cheering you on as you do so), all the while having to balance that out with a practical mindset to avoid over-engineering mishaps.

Our constant innovation is done with a clear aim: to turn Polarsteps into the best travel app out there – which is probably why Google created this awesome video about us, and we've been featured multiple times in the App Store, as well as in Apple’s WWDC keynote speeches of 2017 and 2018.

All of this brings along massive year-over-year growth, and with that - the growing pains. So if besides the challenges inherent to feature development in the complex, multi-layered travel domain, you enjoy thinking about the performance and scalability aspects of a platform, you're in for a lot of fun with us.

And because we're a small team, the impact you can make from day one is huge: everything you ship will affect almost 3 million users.

Your role

• Working closely with: Maxi (our co-founder and CTO), Gagan and Hugo (our backend engineers) on all things related with our platform. We run a mix of Heroku and AWS services that power our API, which is consumed by our web and mobile apps and needs to be running 24/7 to support our travelers all around the world 
• Daily interactions with product owners, designers, other engineers and the rest of our team - we believe in a deeply collaborative environment
• Proactively improving maintainability, resiliency and scalability of our platform, addressing technical debt when needed or even better, preventing it when it makes sense

Your qualification

• Having a strong backend background - we work with Python (Flask) and we would love it if you are familiar with that, but we are open to other technologies - we give importance to the soundness of the solutions you architect, not the language you choose for their implementation 
• Being pragmatic in your approach to solving the problem at hand, and not being scared of tackling big challenges in performance, scaling, or refactoring that 5 year old piece of legacy code
• Having worked on complex backend systems, preferably for a product company
• Having worked in an agile team environment
• Bonus points for: Python, Flask, messaging queues (Celery, RabbitMQ), scalability of relational databases, Heroku, AWS and General DevOps tasks

What we offer

• Travel, family time, relaxing in your garden – whatever you need to recharge your batteries – you'll have 28 days of vacay for all your adventures & desires
• We love to spend time together – whether it is during our daily team lunch, Friday drinks (aka Pollo Pollo's) or our legendary road trips & outings – team Polarsteps is a happy lot that is always up for an adventure 
• Love biking? Or do you prefer public transport? Either way, our office in downtown Amsterdam is easy to get to, and we will cover your travel costs!
• The second best thing about an unforgettable journey is the memories of it. That's why you'll have the opportunity to get all your travel memories in the form of beautiful Travel Books – for free :)
• Oh, and yes, that free flight to a random location you've heard about? It's true. Try it out and give our Teleporter a spin here