€60k - €67k
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91,000+ live jobsPerformance & Rendering Engineer
Remote, Madrid·Full-time·Added 1 month ago (last checked 21 Oct)
Our summary
- Salary
- €60,000 - €67,000 a year
About €3,460 - €3,820 a month after tax, or €3,480 - €3,920 under the Beckham regime.
- Work mode
- Remote (Madrid)
- Contract
- Permanent, full-time hours
- Spanish
- Fluent
- English
- Required
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Education
- No studies required
- Benefits
- Private health insurance, flexible pay plan
Visa options
The ad doesn’t mention sponsorship
Not a refusal, but not a yes. Worth asking in your first message.
Pay clears the EU Blue Card threshold
The advertised pay is over the €41,356 bar, so the route exists if Kaleidos uses it.
Skills
Requirements
What we're looking for
We believe that education can be acquired in many ways, not just through a degree. That's why we don't require specific formal education, but we do expect you to have senior experience in the following areas:
Rendering engines. Here you'll find WASM, Rust, and Skia (so it's great if you have experience building game engines, graphics libraries, rasterization, GPU pipelines...). You don't need to be an expert in these specific technologies or in graphics APIs, but you should have definetely worked with them before, and feel comfortable getting better at them.
Hands-on experience with frontend technologies, with a good command of JavaScript, browser APIs, HTML, and CSS.
Regular use of LLMs (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, OpenCode...) as part of your way of working, among other things to make it easier for you to interact with and integrate into Penpot's Clojure core. We've brought AI into our development processes and we have open discussions and workstreams focused on finding the best way to use AI, taking into account many different aspects (technological possibilities, digital sovereignty / open source, ethics...).
Comfortable working in Linux environments.
Languages: high level of spoken and written English and Spanish. We need you to be able to read and write technical documentation and speak functionally in English, since it's the first language for some kaleiders. It's also necessary that you know Spanish (spoken and written), since many team meetings are held in this language.
An example of someone who'd fit great with the team: someone with experience in graphics engines or in-browser game development (using graphics APIs); or maybe someone strong in WASM, with C++ or Rust, with an interest in working in graphics environments... does that sound like you?;)
Nice to have
Familiarity with Clojure or other functional languages (Scheme, Lisp...).
Knowledge of JavaScript testing (Jest, Cypress...) and end-to-end tests with Playwright.
Interest in solving user problems with new languages and frameworks.
Interest / knowledge in accessibility and responsible development.
Interest / knowledge in design systems and their integration with product development.
Previous experience or genuine interest in open-source projects.
Use of agile methodologies in a professional environment.
Background of collaboration in diverse teams (design, marketing, backend...).
Ability to ask the right questions to help product development.
Care for testing your own code responsibly (unit, integration, and end-to-end tests), to help reduce production incidents.
Pay & benefits
What you'll get
Salary: €60–67k (gross annual salary)
23 days of paid vacation, plus December 24 and 31, and the option to request 10 extra days of unpaid leave. We're very flexible with your dates, you just need to make sure it works for your team.
Choose the holiday calendar of where you live or of our headquarters (Madrid).
Continuous learning through internal and external training, conferences, and events (as a rule, we usually cover 100% of the cost). We encourage you to experiment with new best practices!
Company-paid language classes (English and Spanish): classes paid for by the company, as part of your working hours.
2 PIWEEKs a year! A PIWEEK is a week-long, open-format hackathon where you pause your daily work and focus, alone or with a team, on a great project. Penpot itself was born in a past PIWEEK!
Level up your workspace. We provide a budget every 3 years to renew your equipment, and after 3 years you get to keep the "old" gear!
Alan health insurance through flexible compensation (coverage only in Spain).
The role
At Penpot we build the design tool that brings together people who design and people who code, within a free, collaborative software environment. We're constantly adding new features that the community and our users ask for, and our challenge is to make all of them as stable and efficient as possible.
You'll be part of a small team working in Rust on Penpot's rendering engine (built with WASM, Rust, and Skia), on the text editor, and on ongoing performance improvements. Your work will be focused on fixing bugs, improving performance, and building new features for that engine. Performance is the main focus: help us make Penpot run smoothly in the browser, with response times as fast as possible.
You'll also have some points of contact with the frontend, mainly when it comes to passing data between Clojure and the engine. That's why you need to feel comfortable with web programming and with the fundamentals of functional programming.
We're looking for someone with senior, solid, consolidated experience, to work within a horizontal team with no manager figure: autonomy and shared decision-making are part of the role.
How you'll work
Permanent contract. We're looking for someone to stay with us for the long run.
Flexible schedule. Even better! We all work from 10am to 2pm CET. You can work the rest of your hours whenever you like.
37.5h/week as part of our plan to create a better work-life balance.
100% remote position. We keep an office in Madrid (Spain), though attending in person is optional. You can work remotely from anywhere with a reliable internet connection, as long as you're within CET +/- 1 time zone, or you can choose to come into the office whenever you like.
Hiring process
First interview (25 min) with the People team: we'll talk about Kaleidos's principles, why this role exists, conditions, benefits, and challenges.
You send us your cover letter, which we review together with your CV with the selection committee.
Cultural interview, with two colleagues from different departments.
Technical interview.
Conversation with Pablo
At each stage we'll get back to you, whether you're moving forward in the process or not, and your feedback will help us improve our processes. We might take a while to respond, especially in the early stages, since our team is quite small, but we want to treat you with care and attention.
About Kaleidos
Kaleidos is an open source software company based in Madrid, Spain, known for creating innovative products like Penpot, the open-source design and prototyping platform, and Taiga, a project management tool. The company operates as a distributed team with a strong emphasis on open source principles, transparency, and community-driven development. With a relatively small but highly skilled team, Kaleidos focuses on building tools that empower designers and developers worldwide.
Kaleidos has its roots in Spain and maintains a strong presence in Madrid, where it was founded. The company culture is deeply collaborative, remote-friendly, and values work-life balance, making it an attractive option for international professionals interested in open source and product development. While the team is primarily Spanish-speaking, the company's products and community are global, and they welcome talent from diverse backgrounds who are passionate about open source.
- Industry
- Open Source Software
- Founded
- 2011
- Employees
- 11–50
- Headquarters
- Madrid, Spain
- In Spain
- Madrid
Good to know if you are moving
- Kaleidos is a remote-first company, allowing flexibility for international hires to work from anywhere, though the main office is in Madrid.
- The company is a key contributor to the open source ecosystem, with products like Penpot and Taiga used by thousands of developers and designers worldwide.
- Kaleidos has a strong focus on work-life balance and offers a collaborative, non-hierarchical work environment.
- While the team communicates primarily in Spanish, they are open to international candidates and often work in English for technical discussions.
- The company is known for its commitment to ethical software and user privacy, which can be appealing for professionals aligned with these values.
In their own words
About the company & team
Kaleidos is the company behind Penpot, the first open source design platform built for design and code teams to work together. We're a horizontal organization, with no traditional hierarchy, and our values are grounded in free software principles, along with honesty, feminism, work-life balance, transparency, generosity, and joy in what we do. At Kaleidos we have a real commitment to diversity in all its forms. Our team is made up of more than 50% women, and we'd love to find new teammates who share our values, who we can keep learning from and keep building Penpot with.Kaleidos is the company behind Penpot, the first open source design platform built for design and code teams to work together. We're a horizontal organization, with no traditional hierarchy, and our values are grounded in free software principles, along with honesty, feminism, work-life balance, transparency, generosity, and joy in what we do. At Kaleidos we have a real commitment to diversity in all its forms. Our team is made up of more than 50% women, and we'd love to find new teammates who share our values, who we can keep learning from and keep building Penpot with.
You'll regularly work with Elena, Alex, Belén, Andrey, and Alonso, and you'll be in touch with the other software developers and creators of Penpot within the product team. You'll also have periodic cross-team meetings to keep up with the state of the business and the product with other Kaleidos / Penpot teams.
An environment where your opinion matters. We have a consensus-based decision-making culture. You'll quickly find yourself involved in everything happening at Kaleidos.
An open source company. Our products are open source and we support the open source ecosystem as much as we can. We're fully committed.
Self-organized teams: we believe that providing autonomy and independence is key to personal and collective responsibility. Teams at Kaleidos operate internally with very little hierarchy and enjoy the freedom to organize themselves however works best.
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€45k - €63k
Blue Card threshold🇬🇧 🇪🇸
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