Jumpstart Your Software Engineering Career
Announcing our Engineer in Residence Program!
Nobody graduates from years of university dreaming of a career path where you grind away climbing the corporate ladder to just be a slightly bigger cog in a machine. Unfortunately, that’s where most people end up. We want to change that by offering opportunities for Software Engineers to upskill themselves in a fast-paced environment while fast-tracking their careers by launching them into positions of high impact in new ventures that we think will change the world.
What is StartupGym Studio?
We are a Venture Studio based out of Milan, Italy working on creating a better society by building companies alongside purpose-driven founders. Our team consists of builders who have a long history of starting and exiting successful companies in Italy and around the world. We aren’t an accelerator or an incubator, but rather we work hands-on with talented founders to both find business opportunities as well as validate them in Italy and the rest of Europe. Functioning as an extension of the co-founding team, we work together in a focused way to take an idea to market and ultimately to a successful financing round. Our model envisions us testing and validating several business models every year and with a sector-agnostic approach to our investment thesis: there is no shortage of new challenges to work on every day.
Calling all Engineers!
Today we are announcing our Engineering in Residence program, a unique opportunity to fast-track your career and be a part of real change. This program is quite different from your usual Software Engineering role but in a good way.
Firstly, and more importantly, the key difference is that we are a company that wants you to leave! That may sound a bit strange to read, but let me explain. We are trying to build the next generation of tech leads and CTOs for our portfolio companies, meaning that at the end of your journey with us, we want you to be a full-time member (or even cofounder) of one of these companies. As a studio, we invest in people before we invest in ideas, and that applies to our engineers as well. A successful journey with us would see an engineer spending between 6 months to 2 years inside the studio depending on their incoming seniority and then launching into the startup of their choice when the fit seems right. You get the chance to not only hear about ideas before deciding to commit to them but rather take part in the MVP process and contribute from day 0.
While you are in the studio, you’ll be learning from experienced engineers who have led teams and projects in Silicon Valley, Asia, and Europe, and building the skills you need to be a confident leader. These learnings will encompass both the hands-on technical side, as well as the team building and managerial side which you will need as you grow into your future leadership position in your startup. Even after you leave the studio, we will be here to provide you with advice and support and ensure you have the best chance for success.
The second key difference is that you will be working on countless different projects in all kinds of sectors. To be more specific, our first 4 projects spanned across e-commerce, blockchain, traditional fintech, and health tech. Our future projects will be just as diverse! If you want to be exposed to many different ideas, and find the one that really resonates with you, this is the place to be.
Engineering is at the core of what we do
We focus on building digital businesses, meaning Engineers are key to our success. Within the studio, we have a team of engineers who work alongside the founders to bring the ideas to life in the form of an MVP. At this point, there are countless no-code tools that allow non-technical people to build very basic MVPs (think of landing pages, surveys, etc.) without the help of experienced engineers. However, our goal is to bring a much more meaningful product to the market that helps us not just assess the demand for an idea, but also build an understanding of how users will really interact with it and where the opportunities for growth will be. This results in a much more credible business model that has a higher chance of success in the future.
To achieve this goal in such a short period of build time, our engineering team works not only on building out the new products but also thinking about how to roll back the best pieces and learnings into a boilerplate that we can use for future projects. We mostly build on top of a modern React + Node tech stack, utilizing various cloud resources from Google Cloud + Firebase to get to scale with minimal effort. As an engineer working on these MVPs, you will be challenged weekly to think about new business models and how we can use software to unlock their potential, while also needing to think about how to contribute to the long-term success of the technical assets of the studio team.
But startups are very risky…
That’s true, but it depends on how you look at it! There is always the risk of a startup failing and the idea not working in the market, however, taking a “steady” job at a large multinational company carries other risks people often overlook. There is the risk of not growing, not learning, and not being challenged enough that you find yourself feeling unhappy and unfulfilled in the role. As for the risk of a startup failing, StartupGym Studio alleviates that risk by welcoming alumni of our startups back into the studio for their next challenge. You can think of the studio as a safety net, and as long as you did your best to make the project succeed, we’d love to continue to work with you again.
You sold me on it… how do I apply?!
Check out our careers page on the StartupGym website and apply for our software engineering positions. If you have any other questions or simply want to chat, feel free to also reach out to Tarek directly on LinkedIn.
