TL;DR

Bestie Bite is Italy’s leading video-review platform for restaurants now expanding to the US.

We’re looking for a freelance Full-Stack Engineer to work side by side with our CTO on the NestJS backend that powers the product and the three web frontends around it: video feed ranking algorithms, geospatial search, AI-powered natural language discovery, restaurateur self-service dashboard, public website, and internal backoffice. Direct impact on the company’s growth, from day one. This is a freelance engagement today, with the intention to bring the right person into the core team as we scale.

Who We’re Looking For

• 1+ year of experience building web products. You can work across the stack, frontend and backend.
• AI-pilled. You use AI to move fast and you’ve already integrated it into things you’ve built.
• Pragmatic. You ship a working prototype in 2 days rather than spend 2 weeks perfecting something unvalidated.
• Business mindset. You care about what to build and why, not just how. You propose experiments, you don’t wait for tickets.
• UX-minded. You care about building products that are genuinely beautiful and delightful to use, even internal tools.
• Agile by default. Conventional commits, PR reviews, fast feedback loops. You feel at home in a weekly release cadence.

Our stack

• Backend: NestJS 10, TypeORM, PostgreSQL + PostGIS, Redis + Bull, Firebase Admin SDK, Vertex AI / Gemini
• Frontend: TypeScript, React 18/19, Next.js 15 (App Router, Server Actions), Vite, TanStack Query, Tailwind, shadcn/ui + Radix, Zod, React Hook Form
• Maps: Leaflet (with clustering), Google Maps, PostGIS geospatial queries server-side
• Real-time: Socket.io, SSE streaming
• Integrations: Stripe, Brevo, Twilio, bunny.net, Amplitude
• Infra: Docker Swarm + Cloud Run, Firebase Hosting / App Hosting, GCP Secret Manager
• Tooling: pnpm, ESLint + Prettier, semantic-release, Firebase preview channels

What We Offer

• €30,000–40,000 RAL: freelance contract, full-time commitment.
• Fully remote. Work from anywhere in an Italy-compatible timezone. We’re based in Rome and San Francisco, with a tech hub in Treviso. Periodic in-person team meet-ups.
• Real ownership. No middlemen PMs, no over-specified tickets. You propose, prototype, ship, measure.
• Concrete impact. We’re a small team, your work directly affects thousands of users in Italy and soon in San Francisco.
• Weekly releases, tight feedback loops. In 6 months you’ll ship things that would take years elsewhere.
• Path to full-time + stock option plan. We evaluate permanent team placement and equity participation for engineers who grow with us.
• Modern stack, deep work culture. Rare meetings, real focus time, freedom to propose solutions.

What You’ll Do

Your mandate is simple: build and evolve the B2B platform, and the three web frontends around it. You’ll work in close collaboration with the CTO in a continuous cycle of testing and iteration, real algorithms on real data, LLM integrations in production, geospatial queries at scale, and tooling the whole team uses every day. You propose, prototype, ship, measure, iterate.

• Backend & API — the brain of Bestie Bite. Video feed ranking algorithms (multi-factor with time decay, anti-inflation, diversification), geospatial search (PostGIS, geohash, tile-based retrieval), AI/LLM pipeline for natural language search (Vertex AI / Gemini with structured output), async queues, real-time via Socket.io.
• Restaurateur dashboard — self-service portal with Stripe onboarding, subscription management, content upload, views/conversion analytics, QR code generation, Google Maps integration.
• Internal backoffice — the team’s operational hub. Content moderation, partner management, audit logs, CSV bulk operations, clustered place map, complex data grids.
• Public website — marketing site, dynamic landing pages, SEO, Core Web Vitals, i18n. Next.js 15 App Router with SSR and Server Actions.
• Integrations — Stripe (subscriptions, webhooks, idempotency), Brevo (transactional email), Twilio (WhatsApp, A2P 10DLC for the US market), bunny.net (CDN/video storage).

Hiring Process

After an initial screening:

1. Intro call — 30 min with the CTO
2. Technical case / pair programming — 90 min
3. Final interview — 60 min with CEO & COO

We aim to close the process within 2 weeks.

Who Is Bestie Bite?

Bestie Bite is Italy’s leading video-review platform for restaurant discovery. Powered by real videos from local foodies and creators, we’re making it easier than ever for people to find their next favourite meal and for restaurant owners to connect with their next best customers. And this is just the beginning. Our vision goes far beyond that.

Thanks to our cashback and gamification system, we went viral on social media and hit the top of the App Store charts. Today we have thousands of daily active users and hundreds of restaurant partners across Italy. We closed a €700k funding round in January 2026 and are in the process of closing a significant new round. We’ve also opened the US market, launching first in San Francisco.

The team is small, sharp and technically strong: Carlotta (CEO), Caterina (COO & CMO), both with years of experience in the restaurant industry, Placido (CTO, PhD in Robotics).

We’re building the future of hospitality, let’s do it together!