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.

Why join Solaris?

• We are fundamentally redesigning banking processes around AI orchestration, standardized modular building blocks, and embedded regulatory compliance.
• We combine tech and banking in dedicated hubs - driving the technology infrastructure out of Berlin and banking operations out of Frankfurt.
• Through our internal mobility, growth opportunities, and the Solaris Academy, we offer continuous learning tracks, AI ambassador mentorship, and upskilling to keep your skills ahead of the curve.
• We foster a workplace rooted in integrity, proactive risk management, and equality actively driving initiatives like DEI initiatives.

The Head of Product & Engineering is a dual-domain leadership role reporting directly to the Executive Director of Technology. In this position, you will be primarily responsible for driving our Product Foundations and Business Enablement initiatives. You will own both the product vision and engineering delivery for foundational capabilities - such as core APIs, developer tools, and internal automation platforms - that power our broader technology ecosystem and enable internal business units to scale efficiently.

Your Role

Dual-Domain Leadership (Product & Engineering)

• 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.

Product Foundation & Core APIs

• 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.

Developer Productivity & Experience (DevEx)

• 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.

Business Enablement & Internal Automation

• 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.

We'd love to see 

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.

Benefits 

• Home office budget.
• Learning & development budget of €1000 per year and a transparent growth framework to support your career goals.
• Competitive salary and a variable remuneration program.
• Monthly meal allowance.
• Deutschland ticket subsidy.
• 28 vacation days, increasing by 2 days after 2 years and 3 days after 3 years with Solaris.
• Opportunity to work abroad for up to 12 weeks per year.

While job ads usually paint an ideal picture of a candidate, studies show that most applicants meet an average of 60% of the criteria. Unfortunately, many promising candidates tend to apply only if they meet all the criteria. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single item in the job description, please contact us anyway. We'd love to talk with you and find out if you might be a good fit for us.

At Solaris, we are committed to nurturing an inclusive environment, where all Solarians feel valued, respected and supported. We are dedicated to building a diverse workforce that reflects the diversity of our communities. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of color, ethnicity, religion, sex, origin, disability, marital status, citizenship, or gender identity. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

If your application is successful, you will be required to complete pre-employment background checks through our screening provider Zinc. These include, but not limited to identity verification, educational records, references, a criminal record check, etc. The processing is based on Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR. Please see below Privacy Information for Job Applicants for details, including recipients, retention, and your rights.

Information on data processing:

DE: https://www.solarisgroup.com/gdpr_notice_de

EN:  https://www.solarisgroup.com/gdpr_notice_en

The annual gross salary range for this position is:

€120.000—€140.000 EUR