Senior Data & Analytics Engineer
Polarsteps · Amsterdam, North Holland
Looking for a new adventure? You’ve come to the right place.
We're an Amsterdam-based team of 100 (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 23 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 https://careers.polarsteps.com/ you go.
YOUR EXPEDITION AT POLARSTEPS - SENIOR DATA & ANALYTICS ENGINEER
Over the past 10+ years, Polarsteps has grown massively through word-of-mouth, thanks to our product and tech department building a top-quality user experience for all our travelers.
As our first Senior Data & Analytics Engineer, you'll own the foundation that every data-driven decision at Polarsteps is built on. Product & growth teams run experiments and analyse the data every week, leadership need clear reports for investors, and all of that depends on data that is reliable, modelled and compliant. You'll set the direction for our data platform, bring structure to data governance, and own the data infra that helps our product managers, marketers and data scientists do their job even better. You'll work closely with the Head of Engineering on infrastructure and architecture, and with the Head of Growth and product teams on what the business needs from data.
With 20M+ users and ratings of 4.8 and 4.7 on the app stores and features in multiple Google and Apple showcases, we've got an impressive past. But we're even more excited for the future, and you'll play a crucial role in building the data foundation that gets Polarsteps to 100M+ travelers around the globe.
YOUR ITINERARY
What your journey at Polarsteps will look like day-to-day.
- Own the data platform roadmap: set the strategy for our data infrastructure and warehouse, make the build-vs-buy and tooling calls, and oversee execution together with DevOps.
- Design, build and maintain scalable ingestion pipelines for both internal (product events, back-end data) and external sources (ad platforms, attribution, app store data).
- Build and maintain a clean, documented modeling layer (e.g. dbt) that serves as the single source of truth for analysts, data scientists and self-serving PMs.
- Lead data governance: define and enforce event naming and tracking standards, a schema change process, documentation, and dashboard ownership.
- Embed privacy in the data stack: make sure personal data is categorized, minimized and pseudonymized before it reaches downstream and third-party tools, in close collaboration with Legal
- Own the health of the stack: monitoring, alerting, data quality checks and cost management, so issues are caught before they reach stakeholders.
- Define who owns what across our data tooling (e.g. Mixpanel, our warehouse and BI layer), and help teams get the most out of self-serve analytics.
- Enable data enrichment to unlock deeper insights for Product and Growth.
- Explore how we can safely use LLMs (such as Claude) on top of our data for analysis and reporting.
- Act as the go-to data partner for Product, Engineering and Growth, and help grow the data function as Polarsteps scales.
THE EQUIPMENT IN YOUR BACKPACK
What we're hoping you'll bring with you.
✅ 5+ years of experience in data engineering, analytics engineering or a hybrid data role, ideally in a B2C product or mobile app company.
✅ Strong SQL and Python, and hands-on experience modeling large event datasets in a modern warehouse (e.g. ClickHouse, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).
✅ Experience with dbt and an orchestration tool such as Airflow or Dagster.
✅ Proven track record of bringing structure to data governance: tracking plans, event ownership, documentation and data quality.
✅ Experience with product analytics tools (e.g. Mixpanel, Amplitude) and BI tools (e.g. Metabase, Looker).
✅ Comfortable owning infrastructure decisions: cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform), CI/CD for data.
✅ A pragmatic, ownership-driven mindset: you're happy to set the strategy and get your hands dirty, and you enjoy the hygiene work others tend to avoid.
✅ Excellent communication skills: you can explain trade-offs to engineers and to non-technical stakeholders alike.
Bonus points if you have:
✨ Experience with mobile attribution or marketing data (e.g. AppsFlyer, SKAdNetwork, ad platform APIs).
✨ Experience with reverse ETL or CDPs (e.g. RudderStack, Twilio Segment).
✨ Experience with experimentation data and A/B testing infrastructure.
✨ Knowledge of GDPR and handling personal data responsibly in an analytics stack.
1ST CLASS POLARSTEPS EXTRAS
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. https://www.polarsteps.com/teleporter
- A shiny 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.