About Polarsteps
We're an Amsterdam-based team of 100 (and counting), with 25+ nationalities and hundreds of thousands of kilometers under our collective travel belts. What we have in common, beyond very well-worn passports, is this: We want to change the way people travel. That's exactly what we're doing, with the app that lets you plan, track, and relive every trip. Polarsteps has over 20 million users already. For us, this is just the beginning.
Responsibilities
•Own the day-to-day operations of our AWS stack, including S3 and our PostgreSQL databases.
•Spot bottlenecks in our architecture and scaling, both for users and for developer experience. You'll create and execute a plan with Engineering and other stakeholders.
•Review, improve and maintain our observability, monitoring and alerting.
•Manage and respond to incidents, and keep our infrastructure and troubleshooting documentation up to date.
•Strengthen platform security and privacy, working alongside our external security lead.
•Lead initiatives like rolling out company-wide SSO and managing our VPN.
•Support our Data team with the infrastructure behind our analytics stack.
Requirements
•5+ years as a DevOps Engineer, SRE or Platform Engineer.
•Experience automating infrastructure and processes on AWS.
•Fluency in shell scripting, Python and Terraform / OpenTofu.
•Experience monitoring, troubleshooting and scaling a similar stack (Python, PostgreSQL/RDS) under growing load.
•Comfort making changes to backend code when automation calls for it.
•A pragmatic mindset: you know when to cut corners and when to build something that lasts.
•Clear communication with technical and non-technical people, helping them reach decisions on complex trade-offs.
•Autonomy and a collaborative nature. You're happy setting up your own processes while working with everyone.
•Knowledgeable of platform security best practices.
Nice to have
•Bonus points if you've worked with Nix, Kubernetes, ArgoCD or ECS, RabbitMQ, or TypeScript on the frontend.
Conditions & Benefits
•Salary range: Between EUR 84,000 and 99,000 gross per year incl. 8% holiday allowance (based on 40 hours/week). Where you land in the range depends on your experience and skills, to be evaluated during the interview process.
•Equity: You'll be able to participate in our Polarsteps SAR Plan.
•A yearly free flight or train to a random location via our Teleporter.
•A shiny new MacBook to work your magic on.
•Hybrid working — split your time between the office and your home, as you see fit.
•An extensive home office set-up — everything from noise-canceling headphones to a standing desk.
•30 days of vacation.
•Two paid Culture Days for days that are important to you but not recognized by the official Dutch calendar.
•The option to work from another country for up to 8 weeks a year.
•A personal development budget.
•A pension plan.
•Delicious daily office 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.
