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Written by Christian trummer, CTO and Co-Founder
Six years after I coded the first version of what would become Bitpanda, I’m very excited now to give you insights on why we’re opening a Technology and Innovation Hub in Krakow, Poland. Long story short, we have very ambitious plans and we need as many talented engineers as possible who can bring our ideas to life. With Krzysztof Raś, who joins Bitpanda as VP of Engineering, we have found a great manager to hire and lead 300 world-class engineers in Poland. In doing so, we plan to significantly grow the Bitpanda team in Vienna and Krakow over the next few years.
2020 has been a tough year for many. Fortunately, the pandemic largely did not affect us as a company and team. In fact, we doubled our team size to 280 in 2020 and achieved the largest Series A funding round in Europe this year. For this, I would like to sincerely thank the entire team and all our users who support us. Now, to accelerate graduation, we will invest € 10M in Poland over the next few years to establish a world-class Technology and Innovation Hub in Krakow, in the heart of the Malopolska region and plan to employ a team of 300.
The challenge: Scoring, rating, rating
Today we are building something that has not yet existed in this form. We are building a neobroker that can support many different asset classes beyond cryptocurrencies and precious metals and that should be as easy to use as possible for our rapidly growing user base. While our goal is to minimize complexity for our users, the technology side of allowing this is just harder with the more users we use and the more assets we add. Our core challenge is scalability – the ultimate goal is to get a product that seamlessly scales to millions of consumers during a bull run. Our task is to build a system that can scale faster than our user base.
To pull this off, we decided to take advantage of Poland’s vibrant tech scene. There, we want to attract and hire the most skilled professionals from the entire region, running from Backend Developers, Web and Mobile Developers, Machine Learning and QA Engineers, DevOps and Blockchain Engineers, Product Owners and Scrum Masters. We are not looking for engineers who are good at a specific programming language. We are looking for problem solvers in a scale-up environment that fits well with our company culture.
It is important to note that Bitpanda Tech Hub will be home to full product teams that can deliver from start to finish. This means that teams in Krakow as well as in Vienna will build entire products and features, from start to finish and then they will also maintain and continually improve them. Not only do we outsource work, but we build full teams with everything from Frontend, Backend, Scrum Masters, QA and the like. This is very exciting from the employee’s perspective. As a team member, you will have full ownership and not just code for a very small portion of a project that others in Vienna handle.
Hire world-class talent in Poland
I truly believe that Poland is the right place for our ambitious plans. It has shown itself to be home to skilled, world-class and technologically competent talent. The installation of Bitpanda’s first Technology and Innovation Boost in Krakow, with its world-class developers, an exciting local technology scene and geographical proximity to Vienna, was a pretty clear and, in the end, easy choice for us. Keep in mind that the engineers we hire will also work from home while the COVID-19 situation is still ongoing.
The Vienna and Krakow offices will work closely together. Krakow’s proximity to Vienna was one of the reasons why we decided to open the Tech Hub there, which will allow teams to meet in person once Corona is under control. As mentioned before, we will have completely new teams in Poland and also in Vienna who will work on their own products. Apart from that, we will have so-called Chapters, which, for example, will include all of our Android developers, who will also be able to exchange ideas no matter where they work. The goal is that they learn from each other.
More countries, more asset classes
Our plans for 2021 and beyond are ambitious to say the least. We are not only pushing heavily into new markets such as Turkey, France, Italy and Poland, but we are working hard on improving and expanding our existing product offerings. Our roadmap is full of amazing things, adding stocks and ETFs is just one big project out of many others. To pull this off, you need proper funding – which we were able to secure through a $ 52 million Series A financial round, led by Valar Ventures Peter Thiel and other high-profile fintech investors including Speedinvest in September 2020. But in most importantly, you need to invest this money smartly and efficiently. The whole team and I are super excited about this and look forward to meeting (at least for now) the best talent we will be hiring over the coming months.
By the way: this week we introduced Polish language versions across all our services, making it easier for local users to invest with the platform. This reflects Bitpanda’s growing international footprint after entering new markets in France, Spain, Turkey and Italy earlier this year.
I am really looking forward to working with the new product teams who are going to help deliver amazing products and features.
Interested in joining our team in Poland?
Check out our open Krakow posts on Lever, on LinkedIn and justjoin.it.