Associate to the CTO

About Bending Spoons

At Bending Spoons, we’re striving to build one of the all-time great companies. Our objective is to serve a huge number of customers, foster team member growth to their full potential, function at unparalleled levels of effectiveness and efficiency, create extraordinary value for shareowners, and adhere to high ethical standards. Our strategy involves acquiring digital businesses with untapped potential and maximizing their success by leveraging our powerful platform, which includes our expertise, technologies, data, brand, talents, and company culture. We then reinvest proceeds to enhance our platform and acquire new businesses, combining an investor’s attention to capital allocation with a hands-on operator approach.

Working at Bending Spoons as an Associate to the CTO

For a talented, driven, and collaborative individual, this role offers an exceptional opportunity to learn, make a significant impact, and accelerate career progression. Our Technology team is crucial to our mission, building the systems, products, and infrastructure that power dozens of digital businesses serving millions of users worldwide. As part of our fast-track program for future engineering leads, you’ll join a world-class group of problem-solvers dedicated to creating technology of extraordinary quality and scale.

This position is open to individuals with an outstanding track record of excellence and growth, regardless of prior engineering-lead experience. After an intensive six-to-twelve-month training period, high-performing individuals will transition into a technical leadership role, either as the sole leader or co-leader of a business unit generating revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, with the potential to scale to hundreds of millions over time. You will report directly to our CTO.

Key Responsibilities for the Associate to the CTO

• Drive strategy: Develop and execute bold, data-informed strategies focused on unlocking new levels of value for the company.
• Lead an outstanding team: Manage a high-performing team of exceptionally talented professionals, making tough decisions when necessary to uphold excellence.
• Operate at the sharp end of the industry: Contribute to a company recognized as one of the highest-rated employers in tech and finance, with products serving hundreds of millions of users, setting sights on greatness.
• Master your toolkit: Work across diverse tech stacks in a full-stack, end-to-end scope, refining your ability to select the right tools for every challenge. This includes navigating monolithic to microservices architectures, gRPC to REST APIs, Kubernetes to Docker, and Python to Rust, emphasizing purpose over trendiness to unleash full potential.
• Simplify relentlessly: Systematically reduce complexity in processes and solutions, optimizing CI/CD pipelines, writing maintainable code, and crafting minimalist architectures to power scalable, future-proof solutions.

What Bending Spoons Looks For

• Leadership: Demonstrated outstanding work experience in challenging roles and environments, with exceptional performance and outlier growth.
• Drive: Extreme ambition, matched by initiative, effort, and tenacity. A deep sense of responsibility and a continuously rising personal bar for performance.
• Reasoning ability: Capability to solve complex problems from first principles, structure ideas sharply, resist biases, and identify critical details.
• Team spirit: Generosity, support for the best ideas regardless of origin, willingness to contribute hands-on, reliability, honesty, and transparency.
• Proficiency in English: Strong reading, writing, and speaking skills in English.

What Bending Spoons Offers

• Exceptional growth opportunity: Priority placed on hiring individuals of outstanding potential and positioning them for rapid career advancement.
• Talented, entrepreneurial teams: Work in small, results-oriented, autonomous teams with bright professionals.
• Comprehensive benefits: Flexible hours, remote working options, unlimited support for learning and training, top-tier health insurance, a rich relocation package, generous parental support, and a yearly retreat.
• Competitive compensation and equity: Annual salaries typically range between £151,436 and £250,512 in London, and €145,430 and €240,330 elsewhere in Europe, with rapid growth based on impact. Exceptional candidates may receive higher compensation. Permanent contract holders can access company equity at a discounted price. Relocating to Italy may offer a 50% tax cut.

Commitment & Contract

Permanent or fixed-term, full-time.

Location

Milan (Italy), London (UK), Madrid (Spain), Warsaw (Poland), or remote in selected countries. Initial onboarding in Milan is recommended with travel and accommodation assistance.

The Selection Process

Bending Spoons prioritizes verifiable signals of excellence. Do not self-reject if you feel you lack experience. The process includes challenging tests that may take several hours. The bar is set high, and offers are extended only when the right candidate is found, which may mean a role remains open for months. Bending Spoons is a demanding, ambitious environment, requiring significant commitment, but offering extraordinary learning and career growth.

Key skills/competency

• Technical Leadership
• Strategic Planning
• Team Management
• Problem Solving
• Systems Architecture
• Full-Stack Development
• Data-driven Decisions
• Complexity Simplification
• CI/CD Optimization
• Cross-functional Collaboration