Software Engineer (Platform)

About Us

At algo1, we are reinventing one of the world’s most familiar experiences: the in-store grocery trip. We are building an AI-native product that understands each shopper, responds to their context in real time and makes an everyday experience less stressful, more personal and more engaging.

We’re backed by leading investors and founded by two entrepreneurs: one with a track record of building and scaling companies, and the other a leader in retail data and shopper analytics. Together, they have brought together frontier AI researchers and engineers, product and strategy leaders, and senior operators from major UK and US grocery businesses.

The people who join now will have an opportunity to shape the product, the engineering culture, and what algo1 becomes.

The Role

We are looking for Senior Software Engineer to accelerate the development of algo1’s platform. Staff and ambitious early career engineers will also be considered.

You will be a core member of our platform engineering pod, led by Jack, our Head of Platform. You will be turning enterprise-grade platform expectations into software that our product pods and customers rely on.

Despite working primarily in the backend and on the infrastructure that underpins it, the shopper and retailer experience will never be far from your mind, as delivering a great platform means:

• product engineers can deliver quality, scalable solutions

• product managers, designers and other colleagues can prototype ideas quickly using our application code and production data as a baseline

• shoppers have responsive, personalised in-store experiences

• retailers and brands are able to configure, monitor and analyse their campaigns with potentially billions of data points

What You'll Own

• The security of the product

  • Authentication must cover algo1, retailer and brand employees, shoppers, devices, agents and third party services

  • Authorisation covers RBAC and ReBAC

• Developing and maintaining reliable and consistent automated release cycles

• Managing cloud environments that support prototyping features that involve changes to our Android or web applications alongside changes to one or more of our backend microservices

• Gatekeeping the quality of our APIs, webhooks and event-driven architecture in an open contributor model

• Continually improving our internal agentic harnesses (e.g. skills and context) that allow other engineers and less technical colleagues to develop and prototype on our platform

• Adding agentic automation to all appropriate areas of platform stack without compromising on quality

About You

Must Have

• Distributed systems experience. You've designed or meaningfully contributed to distributed backend systems, and understand event-driven patterns, asynchronous messaging, and the trade-offs at scale.

• API design and evolution. You've designed APIs that other teams and clients depend on, and you understand the trade-offs between clean design, backwards compatibility, and speed.

• Database and schema fluency. Practical experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL or similar), including schema design, indexing, migrations, and query optimisation. Working knowledge of at least one non-relational store.

• Real-time data. Experience processing or analysing real-time data streams at scale.

• Cloud infrastructure. Experience deploying and operating distributed services on AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• Shipping complex, customer-facing products at pace. Evidence that you can move real software into production quickly, making pragmatic decisions without letting perfection become a blocker.

• Growth and ambition. A career that has moved fast, where you've taken on more scope sooner than the timeline would suggest.

• AI-native engineering. You've shipped production code with frontier AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or similar) and push further into agentic workflows rather than push back on them.

Nice to Have (or We Can Teach)

• Polyglot engineer. Professional software engineering experience across the stack, with your strongest work in the platform, and a portfolio of production systems you've owned end-to-end.

• B2B or enterprise product experience. Background building for business or enterprise customers, where reliability, integrations, and data pipelines matter as much as the interface.

• Product mindset. You care about the people using what you build, and you take ownership for what your team puts in front of them, not just the part you wrote.

• Containers and orchestration. Docker and Kubernetes in production.

• Retail or personalisation. Familiarity with retail technology, commerce platforms, or customer personalisation systems.

• Startup experience. Background working at an early-stage startup.

How We Work

We are building a category-defining company. That requires ambition, intensity, high standards and a team that enjoys solving difficult problems together.

The people who thrive here are curious, proactive and energised by building. They enjoy experimenting, making decisions and turning ideas into products that people can use.

We draw energy from working together, so this is primarily an office-based role. Our office overlooks one of central London’s best garden squares and is a few minutes from Tottenham Court Road.

What We Offer

• Direct access to our founders and a real voice in the calls that shape the product and the company.

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity.

• 25 days' annual leave plus bank holidays.

• Team offsites.

• Cycle to work scheme

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