Senior Compliance & Risk Engineer
Why Polar?
It's never been easier to build, ship and scale software.
But it's never been harder to monetize it.
Modern startups look fundamentally different than prior generations:
Smaller teams
Exponential revenue growth relative to headcount
Higher variability in costs (LLMs) requiring more frequent pricing iterations
Laser focused on product development and distribution
Delegating and automating everything that is boilerplate – be it in their codebase or business operations.
Exceptional billing primitives, APIs and SDKs are essential, but delightful integration is not enough.
Startups need a billing platform designed for their speed of iteration. Combining billing and analytics in one platform to offer customer- and feature unit economics in real-time. Offering built-in pricing and cost insights, simulations and optimizations while simultaneously handling international compliance, tax management, fraud prevention and more.
That's Polar. We're building the next standard for applied AI startups.
Join our small, talented and engineering-led team across Europe as we build the infrastructure powering the next generation of software companies.
We focus on shipping at high velocity to serve startup founders scale their businesses. Everything else is secondary.
Role & responsibilities: What you will do
We’re hiring a Senior Compliance & Risk Engineer to build and strengthen the regulatory systems underpinning Polar’s platform - ensuring compliance, policy enforcement and auditability are embedded directly into our product architecture as we scale globally.
Polar operates as a merchant of record, meaning we take on the complexity of merchant screening, regulatory compliance and risk controls on behalf of developers.
Your focus will be to bring depth and rigor to how compliance, policy enforcement and jurisdictional controls are implemented across the platform - ensuring we scale with precision, auditability and control.
You enjoy translating regulatory requirements and risk policies into deterministic systems that operate reliably at scale. You also bring an AI-first mindset, leveraging modern AI tooling and agents to help automate reviews, detect policy violations and scale enforcement systems without increasing operational complexity.
This role is ideal for someone who sees compliance not as a separate layer, but as a core part of the product architecture.
You’ll work with the team to:
Advance Compliance Across the Merchant Lifecycle: Partner with the team and legal counsel to design and refine how regulatory requirements are implemented across onboarding, billing, payouts and the merchant lifecycle - increasing systemic integrity as the platform scales.
Elevate Policy & Enforcement Systems: Translate risk policies, thresholds and monitoring rules into deterministic systems - ensuring enforcement decisions are consistent, explainable and automated across the platform.
Increase Auditability & Control Surfaces: Improve observability, traceability and explainability across compliance-sensitive systems. Ensure enforcement decisions and lifecycle state changes are reviewable, measurable and resilient.
Collaborate Across Product & Compliance: Partner with product, support, financial operations and legal to translate regulatory obligations and acceptable use constraints into well-designed workflows and platform safeguards.
Reduce Platform Risk Through Architecture: Identify and ship structural improvements that reduce regulatory exposure — including merchant onboarding controls, transaction monitoring systems, acceptable-use enforcement pipelines and safeguards required to support expansion into new jurisdictions and payment ecosystems.
What we're looking for
Operating mindset
Strong judgement and UX sensibility: You build high-quality merchant experiences with attention to usability and performance and know when regulatory integrity must take precedence - embedding guardrails without degrading the merchant experience.
Systems thinking and lifecycle rigor: You model state transitions explicitly, anticipate edge cases and design for consistency and control across money movement workflows.
Security and audit-first mindset: You treat auditability, access control and traceable decision-making as first-class design requirements.
AI-first problem solving. You are comfortable building AI tools, agents and automation systems to scale operational workflows such as merchant reviews, policy enforcement and anomaly detection.
High-ownership collaboration: You operate effectively in small teams, align across product, legal and compliance, influence architecture around regulatory systems and take responsibility for platform integrity alongside feature delivery.
Technical skills
Strong backend and API design expertisewith the ability to encode policy, state transitions, and enforcement logic into clear, durable systems.
High proficiency in SQL and data modeling, reasoning rigorously about audit trails, reporting integrity and enforcement metrics.
Strong production debugging skills across financial workflows, tracing issues across services, logs, and audit trails in distributed systems.
Experience
5+ years building and scaling customer-facing SaaS or fintech products, ideally in high-growth environments.
Depth in compliance- or risk-sensitive product domains — such as KYC/KYB onboarding flows, transaction monitoring, fraud or abuse detection systems, policy enforcement, payouts or financial lifecycle management.
Experience working with regulatory requirements, payment ecosystems or risk-sensitive infrastructure where auditability and enforcement systems are critical.
Nice-to-have: Open source contributions or side projects/apps to showcase.
What we offer
Meaningful ownership: Small team & large surface area. You’ll directly influence how the company and platform scale.
Product-driven culture: We build to empower the next generation of software companies - and operate with the same builder mindset internally.
Competitive compensation: Salary and equity aligned with the impact of the role.
Exceptional team: Work with highly talented team members distributed across Europe.
Remote-first environment: Work from anywhere in Europe, with a home office setup budget available.
Annual team offsites: As the team is spread across Europe, we gather in person at least once a year to collaborate, plan, and spend time.
Health Benefits: Comprehensive health coverage to support you and your family.
Parental leave: Paid parental leave aligned with the standards and regulations of your local jurisdiction.
How We Hire
Polar is a remote-first company, with team members across Europe, and our hiring process is fully remote via video calls and email.
Hiring Process
Application Review: We review your application and previous work.
Intro call: A short conversation with Birk (Founder and CEO) to learn more about you and give you a chance to learn more about Polar.
Take-home Assignment: A practical exercise designed to reflect the kind of problems you would work on in the role.
Assignment Review: We review your assignment and feedback together
Team Conversations: 2-3 video calls where you get the chance to meet future team members.
Offer 🎉
Reference Calls