IOS Lead

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 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.

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 travellers. 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. And we’re one of the top 26 apps for 2026 according to Apple!

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 millions of 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 an 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 on top of the challenges inherent to feature development, you enjoy thinking about the performance and scalability aspects of a platform, you're in for a lot of fun with us.

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

You will:

• Lead and mentor a team of highly qualified, high performing iOS engineers.

• Through your leadership strengths, make a difference in creating a high performing team that is highly engaged and collaborative.

• Partner with Jimmy, our iOS Tech Lead, to balance technical excellence with strong people leadership across the iOS team.

• Work with our iOS engineers on all things related to our app.

• Spend approximately 40% of your time leading our iOS discipline, and 60% in the role of a senior engineer working on our app.

• Have daily interactions with product managers, designers, other engineers, and the rest of our team - we believe in a deeply collaborative environment.

• Proactively improve our app's maintainability, resiliency, and extensibility, addressing technical debt when needed or even better, preventing it when it makes sense.

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

• You’ve led teams of 3/4 or more engineers for 2 or more years.

• True “on the ground” experience with leading and mentoring engineers: helping your teammates grow, thrive, and do their best work, while keeping the team atmosphere collaborative and positive.

• You’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful side of people leadership, and you are excited to continue in that journey.

• A pragmatic approach to problem-solving, and an absence of fear when it comes to tackling big challenges in UI, architecture, or refactoring that 5-year-old piece of legacy code.

• A strong iOS development background, we work with Swift, but we still have some legacy Objective-C code, so we would love it if you are also familiar with that.

• Extensive experience with large apps published in the App Store.

• In-depth knowledge of UIKit, SwiftUI and experience building complex user interfaces.

• Experience with writing and debugging…