Head of Engineering

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 19 million users already, but, for us, this is just the beginning. We have super ambitious plans and we need a talented Head of Engineering to help us on our journey.

Want to know more about us? Here you go.

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 travelers. And it is this that has got us a rating of 4.8* 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 more than 19 million users.

We’re looking for an outstanding and ambitious team leader, who can help get the best out of our talented team of engineers. If on top of all the operational and organizational challenges inherent to managing and growing a technical team, you enjoy thinking about the performance, scalability, and architectural aspects of a platform (whether that's for our backend, frontend, or mobile apps), you're in for a lot of fun with us.

You’ll report directly to our CTO & Co-founder - this is a role with a wide-ranging set of responsibilities and growth opportunities that go hand in hand with the growth of the company itself.

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

• Drive high performance: You'll be pivotal in guiding our tech leads and team members’ personal development, fostering tight-knit collaboration while constantly improving our workflow and processes. Your goal is to ensure our team is happy and productive, operating like a well-oiled machine with a keen focus on efficiency and effectiveness.

• Get Things Done: You're in charge of making sure initiatives start, and also cross the finish line. You can easily juggle priorities, resources and deadlines - making hard choices is second nature to you.

• Lead the evolution of our platform: You’ll lead the team through the big calls on tech and architecture. The decisions you’ll make together will keep our platform robust and ready for the future, as you proactively cultivate the resiliency, maintainability, scalability and general operational excellence of every corner of our platform, addressing technical debt when needed or, even better, preventing it when it makes sense.

• Innovate and Elevate: We're looking for someone who’s always on the lookout for new tech trends and ways to do things better; and more importantly, is able to identify which of those should not be adopted.

• AI-pilled, but responsibly: you understand the potential and current power of AI-driven development, and at the same time you’re aware of the best way to leverage it to manage its limitations and risks.

• Care deeply about the people in your team, and the success of Polarsteps; you’ll be able to balance being a candid, caring, supportive and empathetic manager with making tough decisions when needed to support the growth of the business

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

Must haves

• A track record of leading and growing engineering teams in startups or scale-ups, leading multiple different teams at once.

• Experience in startups/scaleups or small, flexible environments, in a European environment

• A serious passion for crafting great software and keeping up with best practices in engineering.

• A product-first mindset.

• You’ve gone through both love and hate for Agile: Scrum, Kanban and the rest of the bunch. And as a result you’ve learned which are the key elements to ship value to users as fast as possible, while continuing to build a strong enough platform foundation.

• Passion for travel.

We'd love it if you have:

• Scaled teams of ~40 engineers to 60 and beyond.

• Been in the trenches of a successful B2C app-based product.

• Deep technical expertise in backend systems, ideally in Python (FastAPI) and hosted in the cloud, ideally AWS.

• Scaling ever-growing high-demand APIs and systems exposed to mobile clients? You’ve been there, done that.

• True understanding of business metrics and how technology impacts the bottom line. Experience in and desire for aligning technical projects with business goals.

• International exposure – have you worked in or managed teams across different cultures? That’s what awaits you here.

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.

• Any hardware that helps your daily routine.

• Hybrid working. Split your time between the office and your home as you see fit.

• 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.

Think this is the path for you? Find out more about how we hire.