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, microservic