Kanpla

About Kanpla Kanpla helps contract catering providers create better dining experiences while reducing food waste. What began as a school project now serves more than 800,000 users across more than 5,000 locations in 14 countries. With more than $10 million raised and a team of 70+ people, we are growing across Europe and building our presence in the US. A great hardware operation can either helps us scale faster or slow down growth, which is why we are creating this role now. Who you will work with You will work closely with various departments, and extremely closely with the Executive team. You will partner with Product and Engineering to test, innovate and qualify devices and external products we use, and with Delivery, Sales, and Finance on forecasting, pricing, and launch planning. Externally, you will own our relationships with vendors, distributors, installers, and other key partners. About the role Every Kanpla launch depends on physical equipment. POS terminals, kitchen display screens, self-service kiosks, and digital signage must be specified, purchased, stored, configured, shipped, installed, and supported across several countries. When that operation works, customers go live on the date we promised. When it does not, the delay and friction are very visible. As our first Head of Hardware and Partnerships, you will set Kanpla’s hardware strategy and own and be responsible for developing and establishing all key operational partnerships across our markets. You will build a scalable function from signed contract to live site, and give Kanpla a reliable view of demand, stock, cost, and supply risk. What you will do Define and own Kanpla’s hardware and partnership strategy together with the Executive team. Own, develop, and establish all key operational partnerships across our markets, including vendors, distributors, installers, and field engineers. Set Kanpla’s recommended hardware range with Product and CS, based on customer needs, reliability, performance, and cost. Own hardware commercials, including terms, service levels, pricing, and margins. Make sure configured equipment reaches every customer site in time for launch, and build the processes and team to scale it. Forecast demand from the pipeline and set the inventory strategy, balancing launch readiness with working capital. Identify supply risks early, including single-source dependencies and end-of-life devices, and qualify alternatives before they are needed. Own shipping compliance for the UK and Ireland, the Nordics, DACH, Benelux, and the US, including new markets as we enter them. What you will bring There are different routes into this role. Strong candidates are likely to bring most of the following: Substantial experience in hardware operations, supply chain, procurement, or partner management, including in a strategic or leadership role. Hands-on experience with POS, payments, kiosk, self-service, digital signage, or closely related customer-site hardware. This is essential. A record of building strategic partnerships and negotiating commercial agreements. Practical knowledge of cross-border shipping, customs, duties, and Incoterms across multiple European markets. Technical confidence to assess specifications, and the commercial sense to link hardware decisions to margins and growth. Clear communication, comfort working with executives, and experience building teams. Fluent English and based in the EU What we offer Ownership of a function that directly affects every customer launch and our expansion. The opportunity to shape Kanpla’s hardware and partnership strategy and build a team. Close collaboration with the Executive team and leaders across the company. A product that helps improve dining experiences. Competitive salary based on experience and real support for your professional growth. Remote-first working and two company off-sites or workcations each year. Practical details The role is remote and EU based, covering the UK and Ireland, the Nordics, DACH, Benelux, and our growing US business. Expect regular travel to partners and occasional customer-site visits.

Design what every new Kanpla customer sees first. When a new customer launches with Kanpla, they need more than software. In order to increase adoption and success, we offer launch packages with posters, digital signage, guides, and other materials that help people understand the new experience and get started. Today, producing these materials can involve rebuilding similar designs for every launch. We want to change that. As our Graphic Design Intern, you will help create a scalable design system for customer onboarding. You will turn recurring design work into thoughtful templates, components, and workflows that our teams can reuse and adapt without sacrificing quality. While also executing on on-off design requests from the customer team. This is a hands-on role spanning graphic design, print production, Figma, Adobe, and AI-assisted workflows. You will work on real customer launches, including projects for recognizable enterprise customers, while helping us build a system that lasts beyond any single delivery. What you will work on Your main project will be improving how Kanpla creates onboarding materials for new customers. You will: Design posters, digital signage, screen content, and practical guides that help customers launch Kanpla successfully. Build reusable templates and components in Figma instead of producing isolated, one-off files. Create print-ready artwork with the correct formats, dimensions, bleed, colour settings, and export specifications. Use Adobe tools to prepare and adapt professional design assets. Explore how AI tools can turn customer information, brand assets, and practical requirements into strong first drafts. Adapt materials to different customer brands while keeping the underlying system consistent and manageable. Document the workflows you create so other people can use and improve them. Work with our creative team and Head of Marketing to review, test, and refine the system. What you may bring You do not need to be an expert in everything, but you should already have enough design experience to work confidently with the fundamentals. We imagine that you: Understand Figma and are interested in using components, templates, and shared systems. Have worked with print design and know the basics of preparing files for production. Have experience with Adobe design software, particularly InDesign and Illustrator. Can show a portfolio containing relevant graphic, print, digital, or visual communication work. Write clearly and confidently in English. Care about the small details that determine whether a file is genuinely ready to use. Approach design with curiosity and want to understand how the whole workflow can be improved. Experience with Claude or another AI tool is not required. What matters is that you are interested in experimenting with AI and learning where it can make creative work faster or better without lowering the quality of the final result. A little technical curiosity is also valuable. You do not need to be a developer, but you should enjoy understanding how tools, systems, and processes fit together. Kanpla is English-first. Who can apply? You might be studying graphic design, visual communication, digital design, or something related. You might also have developed your skills through freelance work, personal projects, another education, or an entirely different route. Everyone can apply. We care more about the quality of your thinking, your portfolio, and your willingness to learn than the name of your university or the exact path you took to get here. If you meet the core requirements but do not recognise yourself in every point, we would still like to hear from you. What you will get This internship gives you the opportunity to work on real design challenges with visible customer impact. You will: Build work that can become part of Kanpla’s long-term design system. Gain hands-on experience across print, digital design, and customer communication. Experiment with practical AI workflows alongside experienced creative colleagues. Work on launches for interesting and recognizable enterprise customers. Receive feedback and collaborate closely with our creative team and Head of Marketing. Be included in the social events and activities around our Aarhus office. Have the possibility of discussing a part-time role afterwards if there is a good mutual fit and an opportunity available. This is an internship with meaningful ownership, but you will not be left alone with the work. You will have people to collaborate with, ask questions, and learn from as you build. Practical details Location: Connected to our Aarhus office Working model: Remote-first and flexible. You can shape your mix of office and home working around what works best for you and the team. Hours: Full-time internship Start date: Flexible, preferably as soon as it works for the right candidate Duration: Flexible and agreed with the successful candidate Compensation: This is an unpaid internship, so you keep your SU during the period. On top of that, Kanpla gives a gratuity ("erkendtlighed") of DKK 3,770 per month, which is the maximum allowed without affecting your SU. Language: English-first About Kanpla At Kanpla, we build technology that helps make food-service operations smoother, dining experiences better, and food waste lower. Apply Send us your portfolio. You are welcome to include a CV, but it is not required.

About Kanpla We build the platform that powers contract catering across Europe and the US. We're a fast-growing scaleup with an ambitious, energetic engineering team working to reshape the contract catering industry. Our products help serve food at over 5,000 locations to more than half a million users, and we have offices in Aarhus, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, and Philadelphia, plus many teammates working remotely across Europe. About the teams You'll manage two teams from day one: Admin and CORE . Admin is Kanpla's back office: a high-stakes, versatile system that kitchen chefs and account managers at our customers rely on to set up and run everything: menus, pricing, orders, and the day-to-day configuration that makes the rest of Kanpla work. It's built to flex to each provider's specific setup, with multiple configurations, integrations, and operational models, while cutting down the time our customers spend on admin rather than adding to it. Get it right and our customers run their operations smoothly. Get it wrong and everything downstream feels it. CORE owns the shared foundation underneath all of it: the data model, the core services, and the ordering pipeline that every other team builds on. It's the team everyone else depends on, which makes prioritisation and capacity genuinely hard and genuinely important. Two teams, two very different kinds of pressure. One is breadth and configurability; the other is depth and being the dependency in everyone's critical path. Why this role exists We don't have a real engineering management layer yet. People leadership has effectively run through Product Managers and through senior engineers who were already carrying full technical ownership. That has three costs we can name clearly: Engineers don't have a clear path to grow, take on more ownership, or get honest feedback on their performance. Too many decisions bottleneck in one place, and cross-team initiatives fall between chairs. Our current model scales for maybe one or two more hires per team before someone is responsible for seven-plus people and the technical direction. This is one of the first two dedicated Engineering Manager roles at Kanpla, and the first hired externally. We're hiring it before the pain hits rather than after, so the person in it gets to build the function properly instead of firefighting it. What this role is, and what it isn't We're being deliberate about the split, because we've seen the alternative and it doesn't work. This role is: people and capacity ownership. Growth, performance, feedback, staffing, hiring, and making sure your teams can run without waiting on approvals. This is a player-coach role, not a pure manager. Expect to stay hands-on around 20–30% of your time: pairing, reviews, the occasional small piece of work. Never on the critical path. You should be able to read the code and hold a real design conversation, because that's how you'll earn the respect of strong senior engineers. This role isn't: the team's technical decision-maker of record. Deep technical ownership of each domain sits with the senior engineers on the IC track, and you'll partner with them rather than outrank them on architecture. You also won't be leading individual projects from a technical perspective. If what you actually want is to own architecture and ship features as your primary contribution, this is the wrong role and we'd rather tell you now. What you'll focus on Manage the engineers on Admin and CORE: regular one-on-ones, career growth plans, and direct, useful performance feedback. Engineers on both teams report to you for growth and performance. Own capacity and staffing across both teams: who's working on what, where we're thin, and what we do about it. Partner with the Product Managers on delivery, sequencing, and trade-offs, and with the senior engineers on scoping and quality. Partner with other EMs on cross-team initiatives and collaboration. Help define and grow technical leadership on the IC track. Our career framework is being built this autumn, and you'll shape how technical leadership works here rather than inheriting someone else's version of it. Hire. You'll shape and run hiring for your teams as we grow. Remove bottlenecks: fewer decisions routed upward, more teams that can run themselves. Help build our career framework. We're putting the first proper version together this autumn, aiming for "good enough, safe enough to try" rather than perfect, and you'll have real input into it. Being straight about the stage we're at We're mid-way through defining our engineering structure, and we'd rather you know that going in. The IC and management tracks are being separated properly right now. You'll help finish that work rather than inherit a finished version of it. Our teams are currently sliced by product surface (Admin, CORE, POS, app). Over the next year we're moving toward teams that own a full customer journey end to end, organised by customer segment: hospitality, schools, and so on. Your scope will shift as that happens. We care much more about someone who recognises these problems and wants to solve them than about someone matching a title on a ladder we haven't finished drawing. The practical details You'll manage: the Admin and CORE teams, roughly 10 engineers on day one across both. You'll report to: the VP of Engineering. You'll work with: a Product Manager on each team, our design team, and the other Engineering Manager (covering POS and app). Process: intro call → technical and leadership deep-dive → team meeting → offer Our current stack You won't be the primary architect, but you do need to be able to hold a real technical conversation and read the code. Languages: TypeScript-first across the stack. Frontend: Next.js and related React tooling. Backend & data: Node.js services, Firestore as the primary operational database, PostgreSQL as our analytical store. Cloud: GCP (Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Functions, Firestore, Cloud Storage). CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Vercel, container pipelines. What we're looking for Must-haves Experience managing a team of engineers, including the parts people avoid: performance conversations, growth plans, and honest feedback. Genuine motivation for people management. You measure your work by what your team ships and how your engineers develop, not by your own commits. Technically credible with a hands-on engineering background, ideally in TypeScript/Node.js. You can review a design, challenge a plan, and contribute to a project definition. Comfortable operating without a playbook. We don't have a mature EM function, a finished career ladder, or a settled team topology. You'll help write all three. A track record of partnering closely with Product, and of pushing back well when scope and capacity don't match. Excellent communicator across a distributed team in several countries. Thrives in a growing scaleup: pragmatic, autonomous, low ego. Nice to have Experience establishing an EM function or management layer where there wasn't one before. Experience coaching senior engineers into technical leadership, and keeping the IC track a genuinely attractive option. Background with highly configurable, multi-tenant back-office or admin systems, with many integration points and configuration paths. Experience with GCP (Firestore, Cloud Run, or similar managed services). Experience in food service, retail, or another operationally complex industry. What we offer The chance to build an engineering management function from the ground up, on platforms used daily by kitchen chefs and account managers at customers across Europe and the US. Flexible hours and the choice to work from Aarhus, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, or London, or fully remote anywhere in Europe. A supportive engineering team that values learning and teaching. An annual company-wide getaway, plus an annual product team getaway focused on strategy and cross-team collaboration, alongside regular cross-office collaboration day to day. A company computer, insurance coverage based on your country of employment, and retailer discounts. Real influence over how engineering at Kanpla is organised, not just how two teams are run. Our culture We move quickly but responsibly. We value curiosity, ownership, and continuous learning. We want someone who'll raise the bar technically and socially, and who'll be thoughtful about adopting new technologies, including AI tooling in our own engineering workflows. We encourage applications from candidates of all genders and backgrounds. If you're excited by the role but don't match every bullet above, please apply. How to apply Please apply through https://careers.kanpla.io/