Backend Team Lead

• 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.

• 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

1st class extras

Polarsteps is helping millions of travelers across the globe to plan, track and relive their travels in a smart and beautiful way.

Crafted by a team of avid explorers with a passion for clever technology and design, our all-in-one travel app features a travel planner, a personalized digital map and, at the end of it all, can be used to turn memories into a hold-in-your-hand Travel Book.

Launched in 2015 and headquartered in Amsterdam, our fast-growing team is on a journey with a clear destination - to inspire and connect people through travel.