iOS People Lead

Polarsteps; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 100,000 - 115,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working with in-office 2 days a

30 days vacation

Equity options

MacBook provided

Travel costs reimbursed

Job summary

Polarsteps is seeking an experienced iOS leader in Amsterdam to guide a team of engineers while contributing as a senior developer. You will shape architecture, mentor peers, and maintain a highly collaborative culture focused on performance and scale.

You’ll balance leadership with hands-on coding, working across product and design to deliver top-notch iOS experiences for millions of travelers.

Qualifications

• Led teams of 3–4 engineers for 2+ years.
• Strong on people leadership, collaboration and mentoring.
• Extensive iOS development with UIKit/SwiftUI and Swift.
• Experience with multithreading: GCD, Combine, Swift Concurrency.
• Experience with large apps published on the App Store.
• Comfortable debugging and optimizing performance.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of highly qualified iOS engineers.
• Balance technical excellence with people leadership across the iOS team.
• Collaborate with the iOS Tech Lead to align engineering and people goals.
• Work with iOS engineers on all app-related tasks.
• Allocate ~40% time to leading the discipline and ~60% coding.
• Interact daily with product, designers and other engineers.
• Proactively improve maintainability, resiliency and extensibility.

Skills

Swift

iOS Development

Leadership

Mentoring

CI/CD

Performance Tuning

GCD/Concurrency

UIKit

SwiftUI

Xcode Instruments

Collaboration

AI in Development

Tools

Fastlane

GitHub Actions

Xcode Instruments

Job description

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

We're an Amsterdam-based team of 100 (and counting), with 25+ nationalities and hundreds of thousands of kilometers under our collective travel belts. What we have in common, beyond very well-worn passports, is this: We want to change the way people travel. That's exactly what we're doing, with the app that lets you plan, track, and relive every trip. Polarsteps has over 20 million users already. For us, this is just the beginning.

Want to know more about us? Here you go.

Your expedition: iOS at Polarsteps

We’re a small team, doing big things.

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 travellers. 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. And we’re one of the top 26 apps for 2026 according to Apple!

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 millions of 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 an 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 on top of the challenges inherent to feature development, you enjoy thinking about the performance and scalability aspects of a platform, you're in for a lot of fun with us.

Your itinerary

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

You will:

• Lead and mentor a team of highly qualified, high performing iOS engineers.

• Through your leadership strengths, make a difference in creating a high performing team that is highly engaged and collaborative.

• Partner with Jimmy, our iOS Tech Lead, to balance technical excellence with strong people leadership across the iOS team.

• Work with our iOS engineers on all things related to our app.

• Spend approximately 40% of your time leading our iOS discipline, and 60% in the role of a senior engineer working on our app.

• Have daily interactions with product managers, designers, other engineers, and the rest of our team - we believe in a deeply collaborative environment.

• Proactively improve our app's maintainability, resiliency, and extensibility, addressing technical debt when needed or even better, preventing it when it makes sense.

The equipment in your backpack

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

• You’ve led teams of 3/4 or more engineers for 2 or more years.

• True “on the ground” experience with leading and mentoring engineers: helping your teammates grow, thrive, and do their best work, while keeping the team atmosphere collaborative and positive.

• You’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful side of people leadership, and you are excited to continue in that journey.

• A pragmatic approach to problem-solving, and an absence of fear when it comes to tackling big challenges in UI, architecture, or refactoring that 5-year-old piece of legacy code.

• A strong iOS development background, we work with Swift, but we still have some legacy Objective-C code, so we would love it if you are also familiar with that.

• Extensive experience with large apps published in the App Store.

• In-depth knowledge of UIKit, SwiftUI and experience building complex user interfaces.

• Experience with writing and debugging multithreading code. We use GCD, Combine, and the latest Swift Concurrency.

• Experience using Xcode instruments to optimize app performance and memory consumption.

• Experience with setting up and maintaining CI/CD pipelines. We use Fastlane and Github actions.

• Experience leveraging AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex) to improve development speed, code quality, and debugging efficiency.

1st class extras

Some cool things to make the journey extra sweet.

• Salary range: Between EUR 100.000 - 115.000 gross per year incl. 8% holiday allowance (based on 40 hours/week).

• Equity: You'll be able to participate in our Polarsteps SAR Plan.

• 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.