Staff Product Engineer (Europe)

<h2><strong>About Polar</strong></h2> <div></div> <div>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.</div> <div></div> <div><strong>We're</strong><strong> building the open-source monetization platform to empower future one-developer unicorns. </strong>Going beyond great billing primitives to offer a more comprehensive platform for the next generation of developers to scale global businesses around their software.</div> <div></div> <div>Today, Polar is used and loved by thousands of developers from 100+ countries, and growing quickly.</div> <div></div> <h2><strong>About the Role</strong></h2> <div></div> <div>We’re hiring an exceptional <strong>Staff Product Engineers</strong> 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.</div> <div></div> <div>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.</div> <div></div> <h2><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></h2> <div></div> <ul> <li>Ship daily towards building the best monetization platform for developers in the world</li> <li>Design, build, and ship features, enhancements and delights end-to-end – jumping between frontend, backend, and infrastructure</li> <li>Collaborate with the team on architecture design, best practices, and ensuring high-quality code across our stack.</li> <li>Contribute to scaling our infrastructure to handle growing traffic and complexity, including optimizing database queries and services for performance.</li> <li>Continuously improve the quality of services and the overall developer experience.</li> <li>Engage frequently with our developer community to identify pain points and solve them</li> </ul> <div></div> <h2><strong>About You</strong></h2> <div></div> <ul> <li><strong>8+ years</strong> of experience building, shipping and scaling high-quality software.</li> <li>You're an ex-founder/startup CTO, open source maintainer or have side hustles </li> <li>You ship fast and can solve any problem thrown at you</li> <li>Strong proficiency with our stack or a variety of similar programming languages and ability + desire to quickly learn and pickup new tools.</li> <li>Strong problem-solving abilities with an eye for developer experience</li> <li>Experience with cloud infrastructure and multi-cloud environments.</li> <li>Experience working with DevOps and comfortable maintaining, scaling and improving our infrastructure and participating in on-call</li> <li>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 </li> <li>You care deeply about your craft - be it delightful animations, thoughtful edge-case handling, developer experience or performance optimizations.</li> <li>(Bonus) Experience working with payments, billing, or developer tools</li> </ul> <div></div> <h2>Our Stack</h2> <div></div> <ul> <li>Frontend: React &amp; Next.js with Tailwind CSS, Shadcn, TanStack Router and more.</li> <li>Backend: Python (FastAPI), Postgres, Redis, Dramatiq,</li> <li>Cloud: Cloudflare, Render &amp; AWS </li> </ul> <div></div> <h2><strong>We Offer</strong></h2> <div></div> <ul> <li><strong>Competitive compensation &amp; equity.</strong></li> <li><strong>Remote-first &amp; open source culture.</strong> Work from anywhere in Europe (CET ±2 hours) and contribute to Polar in the open</li> <li><strong>Generous workspace allowance.</strong> Budget for an initial home office setup or co-working membership</li> <li><strong>High ownership.</strong> Help shape our product, architecture, open source libraries, SDKs, and developer experience from the ground up</li> <li><strong>Twice-yearly team offsites.</strong> 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</li> <li><strong>Fast-moving and pragmatic environment.</strong> A small, senior team focused on momentum over perfection. We cut scope before we cut craft to keep shipping fast and iterating often</li> <li><strong>Mission with leverage.</strong> Build tools that empower other builders; your work compounds through theirs</li> </ul> <div></div> <h2><strong>About the Team</strong></h2> <div></div> <div>We’ve written books on FastAPI, built Shop.app &amp; 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.</div> <div></div> <h2><strong>How to Apply</strong></h2> <div></div> <div>Submit your application with a <strong>suggestion on how to improve Polar's developer experience</strong> today - we’d love to hear your ideas.</div> <div></div> <h2><strong>Process</strong></h2> <div>Our entire process is fully remote, and all communication happens via email, GitHub issues/PRs, and video calls. Here’s what to expect:</div> <div></div> <ul> <li><strong>Application Review</strong> - We’ll review your application and may reach out for a 15–30 minute video call with Birk (Founder)</li> </ul> <div></div> <ul> <li><strong>Team Interviews</strong> - You’ll meet a few team members for a deeper technical and cultural conversation</li> </ul> <div></div> <ul> <li><strong>Open Source Assignment</strong> - 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</li> </ul> <div></div> <ul> <li><strong>Final Call</strong> - A video chat to discuss your work, your feedback, and suggestions on how to improve the DX of working with Polar</li> </ul> <div></div> <ul> <li><strong>Reference Calls.</strong> 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.</li> </ul> <div></div> <ul> <li><strong>Offer</strong> </li> </ul> <div></div>