Staff Product Engineer (Europe)

About Polar

It’s never been easier to build, ship, and scale software. Yet, it's never been harder to monetize software. It's a bottleneck for the future. We're building the open-source monetization platform to empower future one-developer unicorns. Going beyond great billing primitives to offer a more comprehensive platform for the next generation of developers to scale global businesses around their software. Today, Polar is used and loved by thousands of developers from 100+ countries, and growing quickly.

About the Role

We’re hiring an exceptional Staff Product Engineers to join our growing remote-first team in Europe. You'll work across our entire stack to ship innovative features, enhancements and delights; obsessing over the developer experience and empowering them to scale their businesses. You're very comfortable jumping between frontend, backend, and infrastructure to autonomously identify, build, ship and scale features. We don't have a lot of meetings, red tape or code reviews. We celebrate and optimize our organisation for shipping high-quality software fast – each engineer deploys countless times a day. So you'll be given a lot of agency and autonomy to move fast towards our mission and serving our developer community.

What You’ll Do

• Ship daily towards building the best monetization platform for developers in the world
• Design, build, and ship features, enhancements and delights end-to-end – jumping between frontend, backend, and infrastructure
• Collaborate with the team on architecture design, best practices, and ensuring high-quality code across our stack.
• Contribute to scaling our infrastructure to handle growing traffic and complexity, including optimizing database queries and services for performance.
• Continuously improve the quality of services and the overall developer experience.
• Engage frequently with our developer community to identify pain points and solve them

About You

• 8+ years of experience building, shipping and scaling high-quality software.
• You're an ex-founder/startup CTO, open source maintainer or have side hustles
• You ship fast and can solve any problem thrown at you
• Strong proficiency with our stack or a variety of similar programming languages and ability + desire to quickly learn and pickup new tools.
• Strong problem-solving abilities with an eye for developer experience
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and multi-cloud environments.
• Experience working with DevOps and comfortable maintaining, scaling and improving our infrastructure and participating in on-call
• Excellent collaboration skills - comfortable working closely with a small, high-performing team. It's a startup so we all have to lean-in across the board to
• You care deeply about your craft - be it delightful animations, thoughtful edge-case handling, developer experience or performance optimizations.
• (Bonus) Experience working with payments, billing, or developer tools

Our Stack

• Frontend: React & Next.js with Tailwind CSS, Shadcn, TanStack Router and more.
• Backend: Python (FastAPI), Postgres, Redis, Dramatiq,
• Cloud: Cloudflare, Render & AWS

We Offer

• Competitive compensation & equity.
• Remote-first & open source culture. Work from anywhere in Europe (CET ±2 hours) and contribute to Polar in the open
• Generous workspace allowance. Budget for an initial home office setup or co-working membership
• High ownership. Help shape our product, architecture, open source libraries, SDKs, and developer experience from the ground up
• Twice-yearly team offsites. We gather in our teammates’ cities to experience their local life, brainstorm the future, and write pseudo-code for what delightful billing should look like
• Fast-moving and pragmatic environment. A small, senior team focused on momentum over perfection. We cut scope before we cut craft to keep shipping fast and iterating often
• Mission with leverage. Build tools that empower other builders; your work compounds through theirs

About the Team

We’ve written books on FastAPI, built Shop.app & Shop Pay, helped ship the Battlefield React UI, and contributed to (and maintained) a lot of open source. We’re ex-founders and open source maintainers who care deeply about craft, velocity, entrepreneurship, and developer experience.

How to Apply

Submit your application with a suggestion on how to improve Polar's developer experience today - we’d love to hear your ideas.

Process

Our entire process is fully remote, and all communication happens via email, GitHub issues/PRs, and video calls. Here’s what to expect:

• Application Review - We’ll review your application and may reach out for a 15–30 minute video call with Birk (Founder)

• Team Interviews - You’ll meet a few team members for a deeper technical and cultural conversation

• Open Source Assignment - We’ll follow up with a GitHub issue scoped within Polar or one of our open source dependencies. You’ll collaborate with us asynchronously—from your first PR draft to final merge

• Final Call - A video chat to discuss your work, your feedback, and suggestions on how to improve the DX of working with Polar

• Reference Calls. We believe reference calls are great and help us confirm our impression and ramp up our understanding and abilities to ensure we hit the ground running productively.

• Offer