Engineering Team Lead (Backend)

Polarsteps; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

MacBook Pro

30 days vacation

Culture days

Pension plan

Team lunches

Office in Amsterdam

Job summary

Polarsteps is seeking a Backend Team Lead in Amsterdam to guide a growing team of backend engineers. You will own career development, performance, and a high-quality technical direction, while delivering scalable APIs used by millions of travelers worldwide.

You will balance people leadership with hands-on coding, collaborating with product, design and other engineering teams to improve features, reliability and developer experience.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading backend engineers.
• Experience building and scaling systems handling high throughput.
• Strong Python/Go/Ruby background.
• Experience with cloud architectures and relational databases.
• CI/CD, testing, observability mindset.
• Excellent English communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Act as a true people manager for your team.
• Be accountable for team health and performance.
• Collaborate with Product Development teams, PMs, designers, and engineers to enhance features.
• Lead technical projects to improve scalability, reliability and performance.
• Develop and maintain the main API and related services.
• Scale and evolve infrastructure to handle millions of users.
• Raise the technical bar through code reviews and architecture guidance.
• Promote responsible use of AI within the team.

Job description

Looking for a new adventure? You’ve come to the right place.

We're an Amsterdam-based team of 90+ (and counting) with 25+ nationalities amongst us! A varied bunch of “Citizens of The World” with a wide range of skills and hundreds of thousands of kilometers under our travel belts. And we 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 relive trips in a smart and beautiful way.

Polarsteps has over 20 million users already, but, for us, this is just the beginning. We have big plans for the future, and so we need even more talented and enthusiastic people to help us on our journey.

Want to know more about us? Here you go.

Your expedition: Backend Team Lead 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. And it is this that has got us ratings of 4.8 and 4.7 on the app stores (where we’ve been featured multiple times). But it doesn’t stop there, not only did Google create this awesome video about us, but we’ve been mentioned in two of Apple’s WWDC keynote speeches!

We’ve got an impressive past, but we’re even more excited for the future, and the impact you can make from day one is huge, with everything you ship affecting more than 19 million users. Even with that in mind, we believe in truly giving our team members the freedom they need to craft to perfection while encouraging a practical mindset to avoid under- or over-engineering mishaps.

We are seeing enthusiastic and accelerated growth of the travel industry, and with that comes both opportunities and growing pains (especially in the complex, multi-layered travel domain). So, if you enjoy thinking about the user experience, performance, and scalability aspects of a platform on top of the challenges inherent to feature development, you're in for a lot of fun with us.

What your journey at Polarsteps will look like day-to-day.

You will:

• Act as a true people manager for your team - owning career development, performance conversations, and creating an environment where engineers grow, feel supported, and do their best work.
• Be accountable for team health and performance: delivery, quality, incident response, knowledge sharing, and sustainable on-call practices.
• On top of your people leadership responsibilities, carry out duties as an individual contributor such as:
• Collaborating with Product Development teams, PMs, designers, and other engineers to enhance Polarsteps' features and functionalities.
• Leading technical projects that improve scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Developing and maintaining our main API and related services, ensuring seamless support for web and mobile applications used by travelers globally.
• Maintaining an efficient development process, including timely code reviews, streamlined meetings, and effective asynchronous communication.
• Partnering with stakeholders to prioritize tasks, align with quarterly and yearly OKRs and enhance the overall developer experience.
• Scale and evolve our infrastructure to handle continued growth (we have millions of active users), with reliability, performance, and observability top of mind.
• Raise the technical bar through hands‑on code reviews, architectural guidance, and clear standards.
• Be AI‑pilled, but responsibly. You are on top of and experiment with the fast‑changing landscape of AI tooling, and act as an evangelist within the team - but always understanding its current limitations and ensuring its usage is properly de‑risked.

The equipment in your backpack

What we’re hoping you’ll bring with you.

• Proven experience leading and growing backend engineers, including performance management, coaching, and setting a clear technical direction.
• A track record of building and scaling systems handling thousands of requests per second, with deep learnings and reflections through those experiences.
• Strong proficiency in Python, Ruby, or Go (we use Python/FastAPI)
• Experience with cloud‑based architectures, relational databases, and event‑driven or messaging‑based systems.
• A track record of improving developer experience, such as building pipelines, deployment workflows, and the ability to clearly articulate the impact of those improvements.
• A high bar for code quality, testing observability, and CI/CD, and the willingness to uphold it.
• Pragmatic problem‑solving approach, balancing quick solutions with structural changes when necessary.
• Excellent English communication skills, both written and spoken. You are comfortable owning the technical direction, explaining trade‑offs and aligning stakeholders

Some cool things to make the journey extra sweet.

• A yearly free flight or train ride to a random location! Give our Teleporter a spin here.
• A shiny new MacBook to work your magic on.
• Hybrid working, our way. Work from home and the office, we ask everyone to be in the office 2 days a week. It’s how we stay flexible, focused, and meaningfully connected in person.
• An extensive home office set‑up, everything from noise‑canceling headphones to a standing desk.
• 30 days of vacation (for adventures or sitting on the couch, it's up to you)
• Two paid Culture Days for days that are important to you but not recognized by the official Dutch calendar.
• The option to switch up your zoom background by working from another country for up to 8 weeks a year.
• A personal development budget for that curious mind of yours!
• A pension plan to help you save for those around‑the‑world retirement trips.
• Delicious daily team lunches.
• Awesome monthly parties, as well as team trips away.
• A lively office in downtown Amsterdam, with travel costs reimbursed.
• Free Polarsteps Travel Books to contain all your far‑flung adventures.

At Polarsteps, we believe the best products are built by people as diverse as the travelers using our apps! That's why we specifically encourage people underrepresented in the tech industry to apply for a role with us. Because we believe that diversity, be it age, race, sexual orientation, physical ability, ethnicity, or gender identity, makes both the world and the workplace better.