
Adaptive · Montreal
WE ARE: At Adaptive, we are a financial consulting firm that partners with capital, commodity, and digital market participants. We value differentiation throu...
At Adaptive, we are a financial consulting firm that partners with capital, commodity, and digital market participants. We value
differentiation through technology. Our experienced teams design and deliver complex technology solutions using our proven
accelerators to create long-term competitive advantage.
Our clients include the world’s leading investment banks, investment managers, fintech and capital market service providers. With
offices in London, New York, Barcelona, Montreal and Manila, we have a proven track record of delivering powerful, elegant and
intuitive trading technology solutions with a global reach.
We are now looking for an SRE engineer to join our team in Montreal and work on an exciting project with a global impact. The core
project is complete, but further enhancements provide ample opportunity for improvement of the system.
practices.
technical problems but also loves sharing their knowledge and helping you grow professionally (we have extraordinary minds at
Adaptive) You can learn from anyone here, which is the beauty of it.
professional and personal life is extremely important to us.
communities through different well-being, diversity and inclusion programmes.
You can check our Glassdoor page 🎉
BENEFITS (What we offer in return // what you’ll get ) CHANGING DEPENDING ON LOCATION
We create benefits with YOU in mind.
Long interview processes are stressful and boring, and that is not us 😉
We want to make sure that everything runs smoothly.
1- A chat with one of our great recruiters.
2- A Zoom chat with one of our DevOps colleagues where they will ask you detailed questions about DevOps knowledge and your
experience
3- A Face to Face interview (either in our office or via Zoom). During this interview, we will dig even deeper, and you will have
a simple technical task to do.
But don’t worry; everything will be explained to you step by step by your recruiter.
Collaboration is extremely important to us, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts, ask questions, ask for help if needed, etc
Diversity and inclusion are key to a great workplace, and Adaptive is better when it’s more representative of the world around us.
We want everyone to feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work without any fear of judgment or negativity.
All we ask is that our colleagues are respectful, collaborative, passionate about what they do, and have the skills needed to be
successful in their roles.
Background check: the employment/engagement is subject to an acceptable background check that will be run by Adaptive.
WE ARE: At Adaptive, we are a financial consulting firm that partners with capital, commodity, and digital market participants. We value differentiation through technology. Our experienced teams design and deliver complex front-office technology solutions using our proven accelerators to create long-term competitive advantage. Our clients include the world’s leading investment banks, investment managers, fintechs and capital market service providers. With a global reach with offices in London, Manila, New York, Barcelona and Montreal, we have a proven track record delivering powerful, elegant and intuitive trading technology solutions. We are now looking for a Java developer to join our Montreal team on a new exciting project! YOU ARE: * A JVM lover who really enjoys working with the latest technologies and design patterns * Eager to solve complex technical challenges, especially in cloud-based environments and event driven architecture patterns * Someone looking to work in a collaborative environment, sharing knowledge and helping each other * Experienced within the Fintech industry YOU HAVE: * Significant, professional server-side software development experience * Solid experience programming with Core Java, with working knowledge of modern Java versions (Java 17+). * General familiarity with data structures such as sets, hashes, caches etc * Experience developing Front Office financial systems, E-Trading and FIX * Experience in delivering OMS/EMS/Exchange systems * Exposure to equities trading & brokerage * General knowledge of data injection/inversion of control * Experience working in an Agile environment (Scrum, Kanban) * Experience with AI WHY US: * To be immersed in high-standard engineering culture. Our fantastic team takes pride in crafting complex technical solutions but also loves sharing their knowledge and helping you grow professionally (we have extraordinary minds at Adaptive, you can learn from anyone here, which is the beauty of it) * To take part in the growth and development of a great company * Our teams feel free to speak up, make suggestions and raise concerns * Collaborative team environment: we all work together, respect each other, and pitch in * Great consideration for work/life balance (highly-flexible, hybrid working model, well-being benefits…). The balance between professional and personal life is massively important to us * We work hard to provide a positive, collaborative and inclusive culture and to positively impact our staff and local communities through different well-being, diversity and inclusion programmes WHAT PEOPLE THINK OF US You can check our Glassdoor page BENEFITS (What we offer in return // what you’ll get ) For permanent employees: We create benefits with YOU in mind. * A competitive salary * 23 days of vacations * 50% of the cost for group insurance which includes health, dental, life insurance and short or long-term disabilities * up to 5% of your annual salary as a pension plan contribution, if you contribute the same * 50% of your public transportation monthly pass * 50% of a gym membership or any well-being activity, with a maximum of $50 a month * Hybrid working model THE PROCESS Long interview processes are stressful and boring and that is not us. We want to make sure that everything runs smoothly. You will have interviews in three stages: 1 - A chat with one of our great recruiters. 2 - A zoom chat with one of our Java colleagues where they will ask you detailed questions about your experience 3 - A Face to Face interview via Zoom. During this interview, we will dig even deeper and you will have a pair programming task to do. But don’t worry; everything will be explained to you step by step by your recruiter. A little tip for your interviews with us: Collaboration is massively important to us, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts, ask questions, ask for help if needed, etc. DIVERSITY & INCLUSION: Diversity and inclusion are key to a great workplace, and Adaptive is better when it’s more representative of the world around us. We want everyone to feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work without any fear of judgment or negativity. All we ask is that our colleagues are respectful, collaborative, passionate about what they do, and have the skills needed to be successful in their roles. Background check: the employment/engagement is subject to an acceptable background check that will be run by Adaptive.
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 Platform Engineer to architect and evolve the Polar platform - ensuring the system remains fast, resilient and operationally sound as we scale. Polar operates as a merchant of record, meaning our platform sits directly in the critical path of global payments, billing infrastructure and financial workflows. Reliability, uptime and correctness are essential - while still maintaining the ability to move quickly and ship product improvements. You’ll work across the platform and infrastructure layers that power Polar - from core infrastructure and observability to deployment safety, internal tooling and reliability engineering. In close partnership with the team, you’ll ensure the system scales to handle increasing traffic, architectural complexity and regulatory demands without compromising stability, performance or developer velocity. This role is ideal for someone who treats reliability as a product requirement and scalability as an architectural discipline, combining deep systems engineering experience with a passion for building reliable, scalable platforms and empowering engineering teams through strong abstractions and automation. While this role focuses primarily on the foundational layers of our platform, we value engineers who are comfortable moving across the stack when needed to ship quickly and maintain momentum. You’ll work with the team to: * Ensure Platform Reliability & Uptime: Design and evolve systems that maintain high availability, predictable performance and operational stability. Drive improvements in uptime, resilience and operational discipline as the system scales. * Engineer for Scale & Performance: Strengthen how our distributed services behave under load. Identify bottlenecks, optimize critical paths and design systems that scale with growing traffic and complexity. * Advance SRE & DevOps Practices: Embed reliability engineering practices across the platform - defining SLOs and SLIs, improving incident response, reducing operational toil and making production behavior measurable and actionable. * Evolve Cloud & Infrastructure Systems: Continuously evolve Polar’s infrastructure baseline and determine when the current stack needs to evolve. Improve infrastructure-as-code, environment management and operational safety mechanisms. * Strengthen Deployment & Operational Safety: Refine CI/CD systems, rollout strategies and rollback mechanisms to ensure changes are safe, observable, reversible and fast to deploy. * Improve Observability & Debuggability: Advance logging, metrics and tracing standards so engineers can quickly understand, debug and resolve issues in production. * Collaborate across Engineering, Risk & Legal: Work closely with product and infrastructure engineers, as well as risk and legal stakeholders, to translate evolving regulatory requirements into clear technical abstractions while maintaining long-term platform reliability and health. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR Systems Thinking & Operating Mindset * Deep systems thinking: You anticipate failure modes, design for idempotency and consistency, and think carefully about how distributed systems behave in production. * Security- and compliance-aware engineering mindset: You build with auditability, principled access control and regulatory constraints as first-order design considerations. * End-to-end ownership: You are comfortable owning features from infrastructure and backend systems all the way to shipping functionality that powers the product. While this role focuses on platform layers, we value engineers willing to work across the stack when needed. * Strong product judgement: You know when to move fast while ensuring that correctness, auditability and long-term system integrity take precedence. * High-ownership collaboration: You thrive in small teams, collaborating closely across engineering to evolve the platform architecture and take shared responsibility for the long-term health of the system. Technical Skills * Strong backend expertise - you design clear, durable APIs and build systems that are resilient under real-world load and edge cases. * Highly proficient in SQL and data modeling - you reason rigorously about long-term data correctness, performance and reliability across large datasets. * Strong production debugging and observability instincts with an ability to trace complex issues across services and understand how to prevent them in the future. * Experience building or operating distributed systems with strong reliability and operational requirements. Experience * 5-8+ years of engineering experience, building and scaling customer-facing SaaS or fintech products in a high-growth environment. * Experience in payments and billing infrastructure - subscription lifecycles, transaction orchestration, refunds/disputes, payouts and financial state management. 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 1. Application Review: We review your application and previous work. 2. 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. 3. Take-home Assignment: A practical exercise designed to reflect the kind of problems you would work on in the role. 4. Assignment Review: We review your assignment and feedback together 5. Team Conversations: 2-3 video calls where you get the chance to meet future team members. 6. Offer 🎉 7. Reference Calls
The salary range for this role is negotiable, the range being $400,000 - $600,000 per year in total compensation. About Sezzle: With a mission to financially empower the next generation, Sezzle is revolutionizing the shopping experience beyond payments, blending cutting-edge tech with seamless, interest-free installment plans that make shopping smarter and more accessible. We’re not just transforming payments; we’re redefining how people discover, interact with, and purchase the things they love while driving real impact on merchant sales through increased conversions and higher order values. As we continue to shape the future of fintech and retail, we’re building an innovative, dynamic team passionate about creating more than just a transaction but a truly unique shopping journey. If you’re excited about pushing boundaries in tech and delivering a game-changing experience for consumers and merchants alike, come join us at Sezzle and help create the future of shopping! About the Role: We are seeking an exceptional VP Engineering - Infrastructure & SRE to own the strategy, reliability, security posture, and evolution of the platform that powers Sezzle. This is a rare opportunity to lead infrastructure through a defining chapter: scaling a high-growth fintech while raising our operational rigor, resilience, and compliance posture to the standards of the most demanding financial institutions. This is explicitly both a leadership job and a technical one. You will lead the teams responsible for our cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, databases, networking, observability, and site reliability engineering, and you will stay hands-on in the systems yourself, working alongside the engineers you lead. Our stack runs on AWS, with workloads orchestrated on Kubernetes and data anchored in Aurora RDS (MySQL and Postgres). You should know these technologies deeply, not just manage people who do. You will set the technical vision, own the budget, and be directly accountable for availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity across a payments platform where downtime has immediate customer and financial impact. That accountability is personal, not just organizational: you will manage the on-call rotation and take shifts in it. When Sezzle experiences a serious incident, up to and including a full outage, you are the kind of leader who can step into command, cut through noise with evidence-based triage, make fast, sound decisions under pressure with incomplete information, and drive the platform back to health. Your team should trust you at 3 AM as much as they do in a roadmap review. Just as importantly, you will lead our infrastructure organization into an AI-boosted SRE era. We believe the next generation of infrastructure teams will pair strong engineers with AI agents and tooling for incident response, capacity planning, runbook automation, anomaly detection, and day-to-day operational toil. You won't just tolerate this shift; you'll drive it, with conviction and hands-on credibility. This role reports to senior engineering leadership and partners closely with Security, Compliance, Engineering, Finance, and external auditors. Your work will directly shape whether Sezzle can operate at the highest standards of reliability and compliance without losing the speed and pragmatism of a startup. Key Responsibilities * Own the infrastructure vision, strategy, and multi-year roadmap: scale today's high-growth fintech platform while continually strengthening its resilience, controls, and audit-readiness. * Lead, grow, and mentor the infrastructure, platform, and SRE organization, including hiring, career development, on-call health, and building a culture of operational excellence and blameless learning. * Own reliability end-to-end: define and enforce SLOs and error budgets, mature incident management and postmortem practices, and be accountable for platform availability across the business. * Manage, and participate in, the on-call rotation, and serve as senior incident commander for high-severity events: leading recovery from major degradations and full outages through rapid, evidence-based triage, decisive action under uncertainty, and clear communication to stakeholders throughout. * Direct our AWS strategy, including account architecture, IAM and network design, multi-AZ/multi-region posture, service selection, and cost management (FinOps). You will own and defend the cloud budget. * Own the Kubernetes platform as a product: cluster architecture, upgrade strategy, workload isolation, autoscaling, progressive delivery, and the developer experience of every team that ships on it. * Own the database tier, centered on Aurora RDS (MySQL and Postgres): availability, performance, capacity, schema and migration safety practices, backup/restore verification, and encryption. * Design, implement, and continuously test disaster recovery and business continuity: defined RTO/RPO targets per system tier, regular game days and failover exercises, and DR evidence that stands up to auditor scrutiny. * Champion the AI-boosted SRE transformation: evaluate and deploy AI tooling and agents for incident triage, observability, runbook automation, and toil reduction; set standards for safe, auditable use of AI in production operations; and bring the team along through training and example. * Partner with Security and Compliance to own infrastructure's role in PCI-DSS and SOC 2: control design and operation, evidence collection, segmentation, vulnerability and patch management, and audit support, with the maturity to meet the expectations of banking partners and financial-industry examinations. * Drive infrastructure-as-code and platform automation as the default: everything reproducible, reviewed, and recoverable; nothing artisanal. * Own vendor and technology strategy for the infrastructure domain: build-vs-buy decisions, vendor risk management, contract negotiation, and third-party resilience. * Communicate crisply with executives, the board, and auditors, translating infrastructure risk, investment, and posture into business terms. Minimum Requirements: * 15+ years of combined experience across infrastructure, platform, site reliability, software development, or related engineering disciplines, with substantial depth in infrastructure, including 5+ years leading engineering teams. * Deep, hands-on expertise with AWS: you have designed and operated production architectures across compute, networking (VPC design, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink), IAM, and multi-account organizations at scale. * Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes in production: cluster lifecycle management, workload architecture, scaling, and the operational realities of running business-critical services on it (EKS experience strongly preferred). * Deep expertise with relational databases at scale, specifically RDS/Aurora (MySQL and/or Postgres): high availability, replication, failover, performance tuning, and backup/recovery you have personally verified under pressure. * Proven ownership of disaster recovery and business continuity for a production platform: you have defined RTO/RPO targets, built the capability to meet them, and run real failover tests, not just written the document. * Demonstrated AI-forward leadership: you actively use AI tooling in engineering or operations work today, have opinions grounded in practice about where it helps and where it doesn't, and have led (or are visibly leading) a team's adoption of AI-assisted workflows. * Track record of operating a 24/7, high-availability platform where downtime has direct revenue or customer impact, including mature incident command and postmortem practices. * Willingness to manage and participate in an on-call rotation, and demonstrated ability to lead recovery from a full production outage: forming and testing hypotheses from logs, metrics, and traces rather than guesswork, making the right call quickly with incomplete information, and knowing when to mitigate first and root-cause later. * Still technical, by choice: you remain a credible hands-on engineer, comfortable in a terminal, reading dashboards, and reviewing designs, and you expect to stay that way. You will lead the team and work alongside it; this is not a delegation-only role. * Experience owning significant cloud budgets and driving cost efficiency without sacrificing reliability. * Strong grounding in infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) and modern CI/CD practices. * Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain strong infrastructure and SRE talent, and to hold a high bar through growth. * Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a similar technical field (required). Preferred Knowledge and Skills: * Direct experience supporting PCI-DSS and SOC 2 programs from the infrastructure side: scoping and segmentation, control ownership, evidence automation, and working sessions with assessors and auditors. * Experience in fintech, payments, or banking, especially in environments with heightened regulatory expectations (bank partnerships/sponsorships, FFIEC examinations, GLBA, or similar). * Experience deploying AIOps or LLM-based tooling in production operations, such as AI-assisted incident response, intelligent alerting, automated runbooks, or agents (e.g., Claude Code or custom LLM integrations) embedded in SRE workflows, with sensible guardrails around safety and auditability. * Experience with multi-region and active-active architectures, chaos engineering, and formal operational resilience programs. * Proficiency with modern observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, or commercial equivalents) and driving observability as a platform capability. * Familiarity with service mesh, zero-trust networking, secrets management, and workload identity patterns. * Experience with CI/CD pipelines, progressive delivery (canary/blue-green), and platform engineering / internal developer platform approaches. * Experience presenting to boards, auditors, or examiners, and building the documentation and evidence culture that makes those conversations easy. About You: * You have relentlessly high standards - many people may think your standards are unreasonably high. You are continually raising the bar and driving those around you to deliver great results. You make sure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed. * You’re not bound by convention - your success—and much of the fun—lies in developing new ways to do things * You need action - speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking. * You earn trust - you listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. * You have backbone; disagree, then commit - you can respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. You have conviction and are tenacious. You do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, you commit wholly. * You deliver results - you focus on the key inputs and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, you rise to the occasion and never settle. Sezzle’s Technology Stack: * Languages: Golang, Typescript, Python * Frontend: Typescript - React and React Native * Backend: Golang * Database: MySQL, Postgres * DevOps & Cloud: AWS, Kubernetes * Version Control: Git * CI/CD: Gitlab * Testing: Developer and AI-driven, focus on automated end-to-end, integration, and unit tests * Open Source: Sezzle is focused on using open source, and we build what we can before buying! What Makes Working at Sezzle Awesome? At Sezzle, we are more than just brilliant engineers, passionate data enthusiasts, out-of-the-box thinkers, and determined innovators; we are skilled musicians, yogis, cyclists, chefs, golfers, dog-lovers, and rock-climbers. We believe in surrounding ourselves with not only the best and the brightest individuals, but those that are unique and purpose-driven in all that they do. Our culture is not defined by a certain set of perks designed to give the illusion of the traditional startup culture, but rather, it is the visible example living in every employee that we hire. Perks & Benefits: * Unlimited PTO, volunteer hours and sabbatical * Life, STD/LTD, medical, dental and vision insurance * Highly discounted LifeTime gym membership * 401k with match * Collaborative fun co-workers * The opportunity to join the fastest growing FinTech alongside a team of motivated and driven individuals CCPA Disclosure: Sezzle Inc. is committed to protecting the privacy of our job applicants. In compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), we inform California residents about the personal information we may collect, the purposes for its collection, and your rights under the CCPA. For details about the categories of personal information we collect and your rights under the CCPA, please visit the California Office of the Attorney General's CCPA page. By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this CCPA disclosure. Equal Employment Opportunity: Sezzle Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other legally protected status. Sezzle recognizes and values the importance of diversity and inclusion in enriching the employment experience of its employees and in supporting our mission. #Li-remote #full-time Pay Range $400,000—$600,000 USD