Software Engineer

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, operate at unparalleled levels of effectiveness and efficiency, create extraordinary value for shareowners, and adhere to high ethical standards.

We achieve this by acquiring digital businesses with untapped potential and maximizing their success through our powerful platform—which includes our expertise, technologies, data, brand, talents, and company culture. We then reinvest proceeds to strengthen our platform and acquire new businesses, combining an investor’s attention to capital allocation with an operator’s hands-on approach.

For a talented, driven, and collaborative individual, working as a Software Engineer at Bending Spoons offers an exceptional opportunity to learn, make a significant impact, and accelerate their career growth.

A few examples of your responsibilities

• Master your toolkit: Work across diverse tech stacks in a full-stack, end-to-end scope, refining your ability to choose the right tools for every challenge. You’ll navigate monolithic to microservices architectures, gRPC to REST APIs, Kubernetes to Docker, and Python to Rust, demonstrating that true expertise lies in understanding technology's purpose.
• Build stuff that matters: Enjoy significant autonomy and take full ownership of your work, from ideation to execution, regardless of your seniority. You'll have the unique opportunity to build software from the ground up and witness your code evolve into a product used at scale.
• Simplify relentlessly: Your mission as a Bending Spoons engineer is to transform complexity into simplicity. Whether optimizing CI/CD pipelines, writing maintainable code, or crafting minimalist architectures, your drive to simplify will power scalable, future-proof solutions.

What we look for

• Reasoning ability: The capacity to solve complex problems from first principles, structure ideas sharply, resist biases, and identify critical details.
• Drive: Extreme ambition matched by initiative, effort, and tenacity. A deep sense of responsibility and a commitment to continuously raising your own bar.
• Team spirit: A willingness to give generously, support the best ideas (not just your own), help teammates, and maintain reliability, honesty, and transparency.
• Proficiency in English: Ability to read, write, and speak proficiently.

What we offer

• Incredibly talented, entrepreneurial teams: Work in small, results-oriented, autonomous teams alongside some of the brightest individuals in your field.
• An exceptional opportunity for growth: We hire individuals of outstanding potential and prioritize putting them in the ideal position to thrive. Spooners in their 20s often lead products worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Competitive pay and access to equity: Annual salaries start around £85,797 in London or €66,065 elsewhere in Europe for early career individuals, ranging up to £250,512 / €188,848 for experienced candidates. Compensation grows rapidly with experience and impact. Permanent contract holders can receive equity at a discounted price.
• All. These. Benefits: Flexible hours, remote working options, unlimited backing for learning and training, top-of-the-market health insurance, a rich relocation package, generous parental support, and a yearly retreat to a stunning location.

Commitment & contract

This is a permanent or fixed-term, full-time Software Engineer position.

Location

This role can be based in Milan (Italy), London (UK), Madrid (Spain), Warsaw (Poland) or remote in selected countries.

The selection process

Our screening prioritizes verifiable signals of excellence. If you like the role and believe you could excel, don’t self-reject due to perceived lack of experience. Successful candidates complete challenging tests that may involve unfamiliar problems and take several hours. We set a high bar, ensuring we find the right candidate, which may mean a role remains open for months.

Before you apply

If you've applied previously without an offer, we recommend waiting at least one year. Bending Spoons is a demanding environment that requires significant commitment, leading to extraordinary learning and career growth. To help you ramp up quickly, we recommend spending your first few months working from our Milan office, supported by generous travel and accommodation assistance. Afterward, you can work from our Milan or London offices, or remotely from approved countries, as agreed at the offer stage.

Key skills/competency

• Software Development
• Full-stack Development
• Microservices Architecture
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Python
• Rust
• REST APIs
• CI/CD
• System Design