Senior Product Engineer

This role is approved for Sponsorship and provides relocation assistance to Barcelona. It is full-time permanent and hybrid (Mondays & Thursdays in our office in Poblenou, Barcelona).

Curious about what it's like to engineer at Rover?

Take a look at our Engineering Blog to see how our teams approach technical challenges, share what they've learned, and build products at scale. We hope it gives you a better sense of what it's like to work with us.

About the Trust & Safety Engineering Team

We build the systems that prevent incidents before they happen: identity verification, risk scoring, fraud detection, and AI-powered detection that flags problems in real time. It's some of the most important work at Rover, our users are pets, and keeping them safe is the whole point.

We're a cross-functional team of full-stack engineers based in our Poblenou, Barcelona office, working closely with product, design, and data science. We care about clean code, thoughtful collaboration, and building systems people can rely on, and we make time to enjoy each other's company too, from team lunches to coffee on the office terrace.

If you're looking to learn from a strong team, make an impact, and enjoy the ride along the way, we'd love to hear from you.

We're looking for someone who

• Has a true passion for Rover's mission and values and is highly motivated by the responsibility to foster a safe environment for our community.
• Has empathy for users and enjoys building customer-facing products that improve people's and pets' lives.
• Takes ownership of problems end-to-end: from understanding the business need, to designing the solution, shipping it, and monitoring it in production.
• Is able to take loose requirements, collaborate with product managers, designers, and data scientists to determine what needs to be done, and drive a project forward.
• Brings their own unique background to the team, adding fresh ideas and perspectives.
• Cares deeply about code quality, maintainability, and engineering craftsmanship; writing code that is clear, well-tested, and built to last.
• Is excited about using AI tools to accelerate their workflow, improve code quality, and ship faster. You see AI as a core part of modern software engineering, not a novelty.
• Is equally eager to share their knowledge and help foster a culture of learning through mentoring, code reviews, and technical leadership.

Your qualifications

• 7+ years of experience as a professional software engineer, with a strong track record of delivering backend systems.
• Technical leadership: you've mentored engineers, driven architectural decisions, led technical design reviews, or shaped team engineering practices, formally or informally.
• Strong backend engineering experience, ideally in Python and Django. If your background is in another major backend language (Java, Go, C#, Kotlin), that's absolutely welcome, what matters most is engineering depth, and we'll support you in ramping up on our stack.
• Solid knowledge of relational databases (schema design, query optimization, migrations)
• Observability mindset: experience instrumenting services with structured logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting. You care about understanding system behavior in production, not just at deploy time.
• Strong testing discipline: you champion automated testing (unit, integration, contract) and treat it as a core part of shipping, not an afterthought.
• AI-augmented engineering: you actively use AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) in your daily work, for code generation, debugging, refactoring, code review, and exploring unfamiliar codebases. You understand how to write effective prompts, validate AI output critically, and integrate these tools into a professional workflow.
• Comfortable working across the stack: while your strength is backend, you can navigate a React/TypeScript frontend to unblock yourself or collaborate effectively with frontend engineers.

A note on qualifications: we know great candidates don’t always match every requirement. If you’re excited about the role but don’t meet all the listed qualifications, we still encourage you to apply. You might bring strengths or perspectives we haven’t considered-and we’d love to learn more.

Nice to have

• Experience with React or React Native, enough to contribute to frontend work when the team needs it.
• Experience with distributed systems patterns: async task queues (Celery, RabbitMQ or similar), caching layers (Memcached, Redis), and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with search infrastructure (Elasticsearch or similar).
• Experience with REST API design at scale (Django REST Framework or equivalent).
• Exposure to continuous deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Experience pushing the boundaries of AI-assisted development, building custom workflows, automating repetitive tasks, or using AI tools beyond basic code completion.

General skills

• You are a collaborative team player who lifts others through constructive feedback, knowledge sharing, and pairing.
• You bring analytical thinking to new problems and are energized by ambiguity.
• You are meticulous about system design and user experience because you want to deliver the best service to your customers.
• You are comfortable working with agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, XP).
• Good level of written and spoken English (our engineering team is in Barcelona, but we work in English).
• You love pets! :)

Our style

• We are proud to be professional software developers building high-quality, scalable, and supportable solutions.
• We are curious and passionate about learning, providing the right environment and resources for professional growth.
• We are committed to building, fostering, and maintaining a culture of inclusivity and diversity, both on our teams and in our products.
• We embrace progressive engineering practices, including continuous deployment, automated testing, observability-first development, and AI-augmented workflows powered by tools like Claude Code, every engineer on the team uses AI daily to move faster and build better software.
• We are serious about the quality of our production operations, with thorough system, application, and user interaction monitoring and anomaly detection.
• We are passionate about data-driven decision-making.
• Our teams are integrated, with developers, product managers, designers, and data scientists working side-by-side.
• We run Maker Days three times a year, company-wide hackathons where engineers get to explore new ideas, experiment with emerging technologies, and build creative prototypes outside their day-to-day work.
• And, dogs in the office. Bring yours, too!

Benefits of working at Rover

• Long-term incentive plan with a company performance-based cash payout
• Pension plan
• Private medical insurance
• 25 days PTO
• Meal allowance and flexible compensation plan (transport and nursery)
• Gym membership
• €450 to cover the costs associated with the adoption of a pet
• Annual €150 wellness reimbursemen
• Flexible work hours - sometimes you'll need to be in at certain times, but on the whole, we're flexible when it comes to managing workload and time
• Dedicated learning time
• Grab snacks and fresh fruit in our kitchen to keep yourself going
• Regular team activities, events, game nights, and more
• Dog-friendly office

Compensation

• In the greater Barcelona area the first-year salary range is €62,722 - €76,027. Additionally, Rover offers a long-term incentive plan with a company performance-based cash payout and benefits to full-time employees.
• The cash compensation offered for this role will be dependent on the candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, and abilities as demonstrated in the interview and hiring process.