Android Engineer

Looking for a new adventure? You've come to the right place.

We're an Amsterdam-based team of 85+ (and counting) with 25+ nationalities amongst us A varied bunch of "Citizens of The World" with a wide range of skills and hundreds of thousands of kilometers under our travel belts. And we have something important in common (other than our very well-worn passports): We want to change the way people travel. 

And that's exactly what we're doing, with the travel app to plan, track, and relive trips in a smart and beautiful way.

Polarsteps has over 18 million users already, but for us, this is just the beginning. We have big plans for the future, and so we need even more talented and enthusiastic people to help us on our journey.

Want to know more about us? Here you go.

We're a small team, doing big things.

If you haven't seen our app yet, go ahead and check it out; you'll see that we care (a lot) about providing a seamless, top-quality user experience for every one of our travelers. And it is this that has got us ratings of 4.8 and 4.7 on the app stores (where we've been featured multiple times). But it doesn't stop there, not only did Google create this awesome video about us, but we've been mentioned in two of Apple's WWDC keynote speeches

We've got an impressive past, but we're even more excited for the future, and the impact you can make from day one is huge, with everything you ship affecting more than 15 million users. Even with that in mind, we believe in truly giving our team members the freedom they need to craft to perfection while encouraging a practical mindset to avoid under- or over-engineering mishaps.

We are seeing enthusiastic and accelerated growth of the travel industry, and with that comes both opportunities and growing pains (especially in the complex, multi-layered travel domain). So, if you enjoy thinking about the user experience, performance, and scalability aspects of a platform on top of the challenges inherent to feature development, you're in for a lot of fun with us.

What your journey at Polarsteps will look like day-to-day.

You will:

• Work closely with Florian (our Lead Android Engineer) and Amanshu, Hanieh, César, Steven, Vadym, Andrei, Izadi, and Shayan on all things related to our platform and, of course, the Android app. The Polarsteps app is largely written in Kotlin, uses Jetpack compose for the frontend, and our shared codebase KMP project, we use for certain domain topics on IOS, Android, and the Web platforms.

• Be responsible for implementing new features, improving existing features, and maintaining the day-to-day operations of our Android App.

• Be part of a small, fast-moving feature team and have a lot of responsibility starting from day 1, with a lot of dynamicity in the scope and variety of your work, starting from improving quality and performance, all the way to finding new and creative ways to making our app stand out from the rest.

• Take part in daily interactions with product owners, designers, other engineers, and the rest of our team — we believe in a deeply collaborative environment.

• Proactively improve the resiliency, maintainability, and performance of our Android app — addressing technical debt when needed or, even better, preventing it when it makes sense.

What we're hoping you'll bring with you.

A passion for problem-solving and programming. We believe that knowing your way around the specifics of certain APIs is only one part of the game. We have an interest in software engineering in general and often share approaches and ideas across teams. We value the lower-level understanding of certain ideas and principles more than a high-level understanding of any given framework. If you get excited by finding out how things work under the hood, you are the right fit for our team.

Familiarity with the trends in (mobile app) engineering. We are permanently reconsidering the choices we are making when it comes to technology. While being careful not to buy into every hype, we do pay attention to the evolution of our industry and try to cherry-pick the new approaches that would benefit our architecture and product at large.

A sound knowledge of the native Android SDK (Kotlin/Java) and the accompanying AndroidX Jetpack libraries. We are using the default Android Studio Stack for development, Gradle as our build system, and GitHub as repository + CI.

A good understanding of mobile application/ platform architecture principles on and beyond the Android device. Our app is an offline-first + background-first application. Seeing and improving on how all parts connect and play together is an integral part of our daily work.

An interest and an eye for the smaller things when it comes to UI/UX and everything related to the Android frontend. Our UI/UX is quite advanced and innovative, which usually requires going above and beyond what the Android SDK can provide.

Experience working in an Agile team environment.

Bonus points for Experience with background location tracking, Offline-first apps, mobile maps (Mapbox), Kotlin Multiplatform, OpenGL, Python.

Some cool things to make the journey extra sweet.

• A yearly free flight or train ride to a random location Give our Teleporter a spin here.

• A shiny new MacBook to work your magic on.

• Hybrid working, our way. Work from home and the office, we ask everyone to be in the office 2 days a week. It's how we stay flexible, focused, and meaningfully connected in person.

• 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 team 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.