Senior Platform Engineer

Polar is building an infrastructure platform focused on billing, payments, and financial workflows tailored for applied AI startups. The company operates as a merchant of record, addressing challenges in global payments, compliance, tax management, and fraud prevention. The engineering-led team is distributed across Europe and works remotely, focusing on shipping high-velocity software to help startup founders scale their businesses.

• Deep systems thinking with anticipation of failure modes, designing for idempotency and consistency in distributed systems.
• Security- and compliance-aware engineering mindset focused on auditability, access control, and regulatory constraints.
• Comfortable owning features from infrastructure to product functionality across the stack.
• Strong product judgment balancing speed with correctness and system integrity.
• Experience working in small teams with high ownership and collaboration.
• Strong backend expertise designing durable APIs and resilient systems.
• High proficiency in SQL and data modeling ensuring data correctness and performance.
• Strong debugging and observability skills to trace and prevent complex production issues.
• Experience building or operating distributed systems with reliability and operational requirements.
• 5 to 8+ years of engineering experience in building and scaling SaaS or fintech products.
• Experience with payments and billing infrastructure, including subscription lifecycles, transaction orchestration, refunds, disputes, payouts, and financial state management.

Nice to have:

• Open source contributions or personal projects/apps to showcase.

• Design and evolve systems to maintain high availability, predictable performance, and operational stability.
• Drive improvements in uptime, resilience, and operational discipline as the system scales.
• Strengthen distributed services to handle load, optimize critical paths, and scale with growing traffic.
• Embed SRE and DevOps practices by defining SLOs and SLIs, improving incident response, and reducing operational toil.
• Continuously evolve cloud and infrastructure systems, improving infrastructure-as-code and environment management.
• Refine CI/CD systems, rollout strategies, and rollback mechanisms for safe and fast deployments.
• Advance logging, metrics, and tracing standards to improve observability and debuggability in production.
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure engineers, risk, and legal stakeholders to translate regulatory requirements into technical abstractions while maintaining platform health.