Platform Engineering

Polar

United States

Remote

USD 150,000 - 210,000

Full time

8 days ago

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Job summary

Polar is seeking platform engineers to build and evolve the systems powering our billing and payments stack. You will work across infrastructure, backend and application layers to ship platform primitives and tooling that empower the entire engineering team.

We value pragmatic judgment, ownership, and security-minded design as we scale globally. Experience with distributed systems, cloud infra, and data modelling will help you thrive in a fast‑paced, open‑source friendly environment on our stack

Qualifications

Strong background in backend and distributed systems engineering.
Deep knowledge of SQL, data modelling, and query optimization.
Pragmatic engineering judgement balancing speed and robustness.
Product-minded with understanding of how engineering decisions affect the product.
End-to-end ownership and accountability for outcomes.
Interest in building abstractions and automation to speed the team.
Security considerations as a core engineering practice.

Responsibilities

Keep Polar reliable at scale by designing highly available, performant systems.
Evolve our cloud infrastructure and infrastructure‑as‑code with purpose.
Make production safe and easy to operate through observability and deployments.
Build leverage for engineering via primitives and automation.
Engineer for financial correctness with auditability and data integrity.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Cloud infrastructure

SQL data modelling

Product-minded

End-to-end ownership

Security-minded

Observability

Tools

Postgres

AWS

FastAPI

Job description

Platform Engineering at Polar

Platform engineering at Polar is about building and evolving the systems that power our product – keeping them fast, resilient and simple as we scale. We’re rethinking how billing works for a world of usage‑based software, programmable pricing and AI agents – from real‑time metering and pricing as code, to more flexible customer identities, giving developers greater control over how they monetize their products.

Polar sits in the critical path of global payments, billing and financial workflows. Reliability and correctness matter deeply, but so does our ability to move quickly.

We’re looking for engineers who enjoy working across infrastructure, backend systems and the application layer – from improving foundational systems and shipping new platform primitives to building the tooling and automation that enable the entire engineering team to move faster.

We don’t believe in building infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake. We value a pragmatic mindset and sensibility in knowing when to introduce new abstractions and when the simplest solution is the right one.

More about Polar and how we work

What you could work on

Depending on your experience and where you can have the greatest impact, this could include:

Keep Polar reliable at scale: Designing and evolving systems that remain highly available, performant and resilient as traffic and complexity grow – identifying bottlenecks, improving critical paths and designing for graceful failure.
Evolve our infrastructure: Improving our cloud architecture, infrastructure‑as‑code and environments – introducing complexity only where it earns its place.
Make production safe and easy to operate: Improving observability, debugging, deployments and incident response so engineers can ship confidently, understand what’s happening in production and recover quickly when things go wrong.
Build leverage for engineering: Creating primitives, abstractions and automation that remove operational toil and help the broader engineering team move faster.
Engineer for financial correctness: Translating financial and regulatory requirements into robust technical systems, with auditability, access control and data integrity built in from the outset.

What we look for

We’re particularly interested in senior engineers who combine deep systems thinking with exceptional product judgement. People who enjoy solving complex technical problems, take ownership beyond their immediate area and care about building systems that are both robust and easy to work with.

Some of the qualities and experience we value in this area include:

Strong technical foundations: Backend and systems engineering experience, including distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and operating production systems at scale. This means that you have built and operated such systems over time to see and understand the pitfalls of the initial decisions
SQL and data modelling depth: Strong experience with relational databases, data modelling, query optimization and designing for data integrity and performance.
Pragmatic engineering judgement: The ability to reason through complex technical trade‑offs, anticipate failure modes and choose solutions that balance immediate needs with long‑term maintainability. You’re comfortable moving across infrastructure, backend and application layers to solve the problems that matter.
Product-minded: An understanding of how engineering decisions affect the product, with the judgement to balance speed, simplicity and robustness.
End‑to‑end owner: A willingness to take responsibility for outcomes, from understanding the problem and designing a solution to shipping, operating and improving it.
Multiplier: An interest in building abstractions, tooling and automation that make the whole engineering team faster and more effective.
Security-minded: Treating security, access control and auditability as fundamental engineering considerations rather than afterthoughts.