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Polar is rethinking billing for usage-based software, programmable pricing, and AI agents. The platform sits in the critical path of global payments, billing, and financial workflows, handling real-time metering, pricing as code, and flexible customer identities.
As a Platform Engineer, you'll build and evolve the systems powering Polar's product—keeping them fast, resilient, and simple as the company scales. You'll work across infrastructure, backend systems, and the application layer, from improving foundational systems and shipping new platform primitives to building tooling and automation that enable the entire engineering team to move faster.
Key areas you might focus on include:
- Designing and evolving systems that remain highly available, performant, and resilient as traffic and complexity grow—identifying bottlenecks, improving critical paths, and designing for graceful failure
- Improving cloud architecture, infrastructure-as-code, and environments, introducing complexity only where it earns its place
- Enhancing observability, debugging, deployments, and incident response so engineers can ship confidently and recover quickly when things go wrong
- Creating primitives, abstractions, and automation that remove operational toil and help the broader engineering team move faster
- Translating financial and regulatory requirements into robust technical systems with auditability, access control, and data integrity built in from the outset
The team values pragmatic engineering judgment—knowing when to introduce new abstractions and when the simplest solution is right. You'll take ownership beyond your immediate area and care about building systems that are both robust and easy to work with.
Tech stack: Frontend (TypeScript, React, Effect), Backend (Python, FastAPI, Dramatiq), Infrastructure (Postgres, Clickhouse, AWS).
QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE:
- Strong technical foundations: Backend and systems engineering experience, including distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and operating production systems at scale. You should have built and operated such systems over time to understand the pitfalls of initial decisions.
- SQL and data modeling depth: Strong experience with relational databases, data modeling, query optimization, and designing for data integrity and performance.
- Pragmatic engineering judgment: Ability to reason through complex technical trade-offs, anticipate failure modes, and choose solutions that balance immediate needs with long-term maintainability. Comfortable moving across infrastructure, backend, and application layers.
- Product-minded: Understanding of how engineering decisions affect the product, with judgment to balance speed, simplicity, and robustness.
- End-to-end owner: Willingness to take responsibility for outcomes, from understanding the problem and designing a solution to shipping, operating, and improving it.
- Multiplier mindset: Interest in building abstractions, tooling, and automation that make the whole engineering team faster and more effective.
- Security-minded: Treating security, access control, and auditability as fundamental engineering considerations rather than afterthoughts.
- Experience with payments, billing, or financial infrastructure is a strong plus.
- Open-source contributions and side projects are valued.
