Head of Product & Engineering

Solaris is Europe’s leading embedded finance platform, pioneering Banking-as-a-Service to bridge the gap between financial technology and licensed banking. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Berlin, Solaris enables fintechs, digital ecosystems, and multinationals to embed accounts, cards, lending, and payments directly into their own products, creating seamless financial experiences for their users. As a fully licensed German bank, Solaris combines the highest standards of IT security and regulatory resilience with a modular, highly scalable infrastructure.

Today, Solaris is driving the next evolution of financial services by transitioning into an AI-native banking platform, ensuring European businesses can deploy secure, adaptable financial products at scale.

• Serve as the ultimate owner of both the what/why (Product Roadmap) and the how (Engineering Execution) for foundational technical products.
• Lead, mentor, and scale teams composed of both Product Managers and Software Engineers, fostering a culture of high performance, accountability, and engineering excellence.

• Oversee the development and scaling of our most critical technical capabilities, including Authentication services, API proxies, Policy engines, Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Webhook architectures.
• Ensure these foundational tech products reliably power the entirety of Solaris's external and internal-facing API suite, maintaining high availability, security, and low latency.

• Lead the teams responsible for developer productivity, managing tools like Backstage and defining SRE capabilities.
• Create a frictionless development environment that allows Solaris engineers to build, test, and deploy securely and autonomously.

• Drive the internal automation platform to support and scale various business units across Solaris.
• Oversee the integration of internal toolings, the implementation of complex workflow systems, and the creation of robust build-automation frameworks.
• Identify manual bottlenecks in business processes and deploy technical solutions to automate them, enabling the company to scale efficiently without an increase in overhead.

Depending on your level of experience, your responsibilities and scope of role will range. We don’t care much about fancy titles, but rather about real personal and professional development, as laid out in our learning framework. Let’s figure together out how you can contribute to our team.

• Have proven experience as a senior engineering leader with hands-on architectural experience in distributed systems, microservices, and Core APIs.
• Demonstrated success in product leadership, specifically managing internal platforms, developer tools, or highly technical API-as-a-Product offerings.
• 3+ years of experience leading product and engineering organisation.
• Experience implementing and managing internal developer portals (like Spotify's Backstage) and a deep empathy for the developer journey.
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts to non-technical business stakeholders, and vice versa.
• Have successfully scaled both technology platforms and the organizational structures that support them in a fast-paced, highly regulated environment.
• Strong understanding of IAM, authentication flows (OAuth, OIDC), API gateways/proxies, webhook infrastructure, and SRE best practices.
• Track record of designing workflow systems and automation frameworks that streamline business operations.
• Comfortable working with AI tools, thinking critically about AI outputs, and contributing to a culture of responsible AI use. We expect you to demonstrate comfort with AI-assisted workflows and a willingness to continuously develop their AI capabilities as the technology evolves.