---
title: 'Senior DevOps Engineer at Polarsteps'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-devops-engineer-polarsteps-amsterdam-k8mr8cazaxbk'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-25'
---

# Senior DevOps Engineer at Polarsteps

- **Company:** Polarsteps
- **Location:** Amsterdam, Netherlands
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-25
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/polarsteps/69a03ebe-db33-4da8-987e-d532f46d67d3

## Job description

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.

Your expedition: DevOps at Polarsteps One person, the whole platform. Polarsteps helps 23+ million travellers plan, track and relive their trips, and all of it runs on our infrastructure. As our DevOps Engineer, you’ll be the main point of contact for that infrastructure. You’ll work alongside our Platform team and support all 8 of our engineering teams, so everyone can ship with confidence. There’s plenty of room to bring your own ideas and improve how we work, with a supportive team around you to figure things out together. If you enjoy being hands-on, setting up good processes and helping others make the right technical choices, this is your kind of adventure. Our ambition is big. We want our infrastructure ready for 100 million+ users, built efficiently in both cost and resources.

## Your itinerary

What your journey at Polarsteps will look like day-to-day: You will:

- Report to Simeon, our Lead Backend Engineer, and work closely with our Platform team (Youri, William, Paco, Jimmy, Florian and Ledio) and team leads across Engineering.
- 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.

The equipment in your backpack What we’re hoping you’ll bring with you:

- 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.

Bonus points if you’ve worked with Nix, Kubernetes, ArgoCD or ECS, RabbitMQ, or TypeScript on the frontend ✨

1st class extras Some cool things to make the journey extra sweet.

- 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! Give our Teleporter a spin [here.](https://www.polarsteps.com/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 (for adventures or sitting on the couch, it's up to you).
- Two paid Culture Days for days that are important to you, but not recognized by the official Dutch calendar.
- The option to switch up your zoom background by working from another country for up to 8 weeks a year.
- A personal development budget for that curious mind of yours!
- A pension plan to help you save for those around-the-world retirement trips.
- 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.

At Polarsteps, we believe the best products are built by people as diverse as the travelers using our apps! That's why we specifically encourage people underrepresented in the tech industry to apply for a role with us. Because we believe that diversity — be it age, race, sexual orientation, physical ability, ethnicity, or gender identity — makes both the world and the workplace better.

Think this is the path for you? Find out more about [how we hire.](https://careers.polarsteps.com/how-we-hire)

## About Polarsteps

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Polarsteps is a travel app that combines trip planning, real-time tracking, and reliving into a single platform for adventurous travelers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (funding stage not publicly disclosed; bootstrapped origins with subsequent investment likely)
- **Headquarters**: Amsterdam, Netherlands
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Niek (original founder), Job Harmsen, Koen Droste, Maximiliano Neustadt

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Travel technology (consumer travel app)
- **Target Customers**: B2C – individual travelers looking for a single app to plan, track, and share trips
- **Mission**: “We want to lead a global movement towards more adventurous travel” – inspiring people to explore the world and capture their stories. [polarsteps.com/about](https://www.polarsteps.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **Polarsteps App (iOS & Android)**: A mobile app that enables users to plan trips, track journeys via GPS, share their location with friends/family, and later relive the adventure with a beautiful interactive map. Freemium model.
- **Travel Books**: Physical photo books that automatically compile trip highlights, offered as a premium/companion product.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: 20+ million users (as of 2025–2026). [polarsteps.com](https://www.polarsteps.com/)
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Not disclosed in available sources
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Team size grown to 90+ (from a small founding team). [careers.polarsteps.com](https://careers.polarsteps.com/)
  - 20+ nationalities represented in the workforce
  - Actively hiring for 15+ roles across engineering, product, growth, and operations (June 2026). [careers.polarsteps.com/vacancies](https://careers.polarsteps.com/vacancies)
  - New CEO Clare Jones leading the next growth phase. [careers.polarsteps.com/team](https://careers.polarsteps.com/team)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unique Origin Story**: Born on a catamaran crossing the Atlantic – product–market fit discovered organically through solo tracking.
- **All-in-One Experience**: Combines planning, tracking, and reliving in one app, reducing the need for multiple tools.
- **Community & Content**: User-generated journeys feed into a global map of real adventures, creating a network effect.
- **Employee Perk as Moat**: The “Teleporter” – once a year the whole team is flown/trained to a random destination (chosen from past user trips), reinforcing product empathy and company culture.

## Strategic Focus
- Drive user growth by expanding the social and follower features (dedicated Product Manager for Growth – Social & Followers listed).
- Deepen planning capabilities to become the default starting point for trips.
- Scale engineering and data teams to improve personalization and experimentation.
- Maintain a hybrid work model (office in Amsterdam) while enabling up to 8 weeks of remote work abroad per year.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as “explorer at heart,” with a flat, collaborative vibe and frequent social events (after-work borrels, boat trips).
- **Work Model**: Hybrid – office in downtown Amsterdam (Vijzelgracht 53A); flexibility to work abroad up to 8 weeks/year.
- **Perks**:
  - 30 vacation days + 2 Culture Days per year
  - Teleporter (annual free flight/train to a surprise destination)
  - MacBook, noise-canceling headphones, standing desk
  - Free travel books (your own trips turned into physical books)
- **Team**: ~90 employees across 20+ nationalities; high retention (first hires still with the company). [careers.polarsteps.com/team](https://careers.polarsteps.com/team)

## Sources
1. [polarsteps.com](https://www.polarsteps.com/)
2. [polarsteps.com/about](https://www.polarsteps.com/about)
3. [careers.polarsteps.com](https://careers.polarsteps.com/)
4. [careers.polarsteps.com/vacancies](https://careers.polarsteps.com/vacancies)
5. [careers.polarsteps.com/team](https://careers.polarsteps.com/team)

## Other roles at Polarsteps

- [(Senior) Frontend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-frontend-engineer-polarsteps-amsterdam-xpfegenh8k5y) — Amsterdam, Netherlands
- [iOS People Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/ios-people-lead-polarsteps-amsterdam-s6yyjfs8mpd1) — Amsterdam, Netherlands
- [Social & Follower - Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/social-follower-product-manager-polarsteps-amsterdam-mapr50kp5q2m) — Amsterdam, Netherlands
- [iOS Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ios-engineer-polarsteps-amsterdam-hgrjsr634gxw) — Amsterdam, Netherlands
- [Growth Data Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-data-scientist-polarsteps-amsterdam-7jf00sgx3wa0) — Amsterdam, Netherlands
- [Senior DevOps Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-devops-engineer-bloomreach-czechia-m1x0j9b9we84) — Czechia
- [Senior DevOps Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-devops-engineer-bloomreach-slovakia-wvftjcpk929x) — Slovakia
- [Senior DevOps Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-devops-engineer-skylo-technologies-bengaluru-whq9hvxa0c9e) — Bengaluru, India
- [Senior DevOps Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-devops-engineer-opengov-boston-qaakda7wfmtc) — Boston, MA
- [Senior DevOps Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-devops-engineer-digicert-united-states-6a7jentjcb0y) — United States