Product Engineer

Cassandra is the first self-service platform for Marketing Mix Modeling: model the effectiveness of your media mix and get media plans that maximize your sales — without a data science team.

Measuring marketing effectiveness used to mean six-figure consulting contracts and months of waiting. The econometrics behind it — the kind of work Nielsen built an empire on — was reserved for companies that could afford it. We took that niche technology and made it accessible to non-technical marketers, in days instead of months, at a fraction of the price.

Today we analyze over €500M in ad spend for 100+ brands worldwide, including Velasca, Boscolo and Takomo, and we're a team of ~20 across Rome and Milan.

We're backed by a €2M seed round led by Italian Founders Fund, with PitchDrive, Webranking and Mana Ventures

We're looking for a Product Engineer — and we mean it literally. You won't receive specs to implement. You'll own problems: talk to marketers, decide what to build, ship it, measure whether it worked. Our product cycles are collapsing from months to weeks, and this role is how we get there.

• Own product problems end-to-end — from framing them with real marketers, through design and implementation, to measuring adoption after release
• Ship user-facing features across the stack: React frontend, Django backend, on AWS
• Turn complex econometric output into interfaces a CMO can act on in five minutes
• Contribute to the ongoing redesign of the platform, challenging what's already there rather than porting it over
• Use AI tooling aggressively to compress the distance between idea and production
• Work directly with our customers. You'll see the spreadsheets they're escaping from, and you'll know within days whether what you shipped helped

You'll own a product metric: activation — the share of new clients who reach their first actionable model and come back to it. Not a ticket you close, a number you report on and defend. It's what drives our retention, and it's where one engineer can move the needle most. You'll see the metrics above it too: we share retention, expansion and revenue with the whole team, and you'll be in the room when we decide what to do about them.

What we're looking for

• 3+ years building and shipping production software, ideally in a small team where you owned features rather than tickets
• Strong across the stack, with real depth on at least one side. You're comfortable in Javascript/Python and you can build the API and data layer behind it
• Product sense: you form opinions about what should be built, you argue for them, and you change your mind when the data disagrees
• Comfort with ambiguity. Nobody will hand you acceptance criteria
• You can talk to a non-technical customer about their problem without steering the conversation toward the solution you already had in mind
• Fluent English (our customers are international)

Nice to have

• Experience in martech, analytics or data-heavy B2B SaaS
• Familiarity with statistical modeling, experimentation, or MMM specifically (Robyn, Meridian)
• You've built third-party API integrations at scale and know how ugly they get
• Italian

You don't need to check every box. If you're missing one or two but the ownership part sounds like how you already work, apply.

Learning budget — €2,000/year
Books, courses, certifications, conferences.
If something matters more and costs more, make the case. We've never said no to someone trying to get better at their job and that brings real value to our work.

Two company retreats a year
Three or four days together. Travel and accommodation covered.

One sponsored tech/product event a year
A conference, summit or workshop of your choice. Ticket, travel and accommodation covered. You pick it, not us.

Equity
We give stock options to people who take real ownership. That conversation usually opens after your first year, based on how you've grown and how much you've taken on. We'd rather say it plainly than print a number we can't stand behind.

The hiring process

Four steps, about two to three weeks end to end.

1. Intro call, 30 minutes — with Denis Stets (CTO of Cassandra), to cover what we're building and what you're looking for.
2. Technical conversation, 60 minutes — we walk through something you've built. No whiteboard algorithms.
3. Product exercise — a real problem from our roadmap. You get it in advance, we discuss it together for an hour. No unpaid take-home work.
4. Culture call, 45 minutes — on where the company is going and where you'd fit in it.

You'll hear back after every step, including if the answer is no.

How to apply

Send your CV and one paragraph: a product decision you made that turned out to be wrong, and what you did about it. That paragraph is the part we read first. No cover letter.

Your first three months

We agree on goals with you on day one — written down, specific, decided together, not handed to you. We review them at three months. In between you get real support: direct access to the CTO, the founders and the customers, and a weekly conversation about what's blocking you. We'd rather tell you what we expect than let you guess for a quarter.

Your team lead

You'll join the Engineering & Product team and report directly to Denis Stets, CTO, based in Rome.

"This isn't a job for someone looking for a quiet ride. We're trying to define a market and become the first in the world at what we do, and that means the pace is high and the ambiguity is real.

What I offer in exchange is ownership. You'll decide what to build, not just how. You'll talk to the people using it. You'll see your work in production in days, not quarters.

If you want hard problems and you want to grow fast, this is the right place. If you want a stable backlog handed to you every Monday, it isn't."