Relocating to Amsterdam for a senior engineer role at Picnic

I wasn't actively job-hunting when I came across Picnic. They turned up in a long-form article about startups going after food waste in Europe, and the mission grabbed me right away. The piece laid out how their model was cutting down on the surplus and spoilage that drag on traditional supermarkets. It was the specificity that got me. Not "sustainability" in some vague hand-wavy way, but a concrete operational problem with measurable impact. I stopped scrolling and read the whole thing. No recruiter had ever sent me anything that made me feel that way, so I went straight to their careers page that same evening and applied for a senior software engineer role through the site. The process was thorough and well-run. Five interview rounds sounds like a lot on paper, but Picnic had clearly thought about what each stage was meant to test. There was a technical screen early on focused on systems design, which I liked because it got straight to the substance instead of burning an hour on trivia. The later rounds brought in engineers I'd actually be working with, and the conversations felt honest rather than performative. People told me about real tradeoffs they'd made and real mistakes they'd learned from. What stuck with me most was ↓