Staff AI Engineer

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 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

You’ll be an expert in agentic development, deeply familiar with the latest advancements in models, the agentic toolchain, and modern best practices. Working closely with product, design, mobile, and machine-learning team members, you’ll design and build agents that drive everything from shopper experience to platform automation and internal efficiency. Alongside product development, you’ll bring your expertise to the rest of the company, enabling engineers and non-engineers alike to deliver faster and more effectively using the latest agentic approaches and tools, without compromising on quality. We are AI-native in how we build. Every engineer has access to frontier coding tools and our own development harness. We expect you to use them thoughtfully to move faster and tackle more ambitious work, while remaining fully accountable for the quality of what reaches shoppers. As a Staff Engineer, you will be one of the people setting the bar for how algo1 uses these capabilities across the whole company.

What You Will Own

• Agentic platform design. Define and implement complex, high-impact agentic AI solutions that sit at the heart of both our product and our internal tooling.
• Evaluation strategy. Establish and maintain robust evaluation (Evals) strategies for LLM agents, focusing on performance, latency, quality, and explainability.
• Deployment and operation. Own the deployment, scaling, monitoring, and cost-efficiency of agentic applications in production.
• Company-wide enablement. Drive best practices and enablement for agentic development across the engineering organisation, and help non-technical colleagues use these tools safely and effectively.
• Frontier awareness. Stay ahead of developments in both frontier labs and open-source models, alongside the agent development toolchains and emerging best practices, and translate what matters into how we build.

About You

Must Have

• Agentic frameworks. Deep understanding and hands‑on experience with modern agentic development frameworks (e.g. Pydantic AI).
• Multi-step agent design. Familiarity with designing and implementing complex, multi-step agentic workflows, including planning and reasoning capabilities.
• Evals expertise. Proven ability to design and implement robust evaluation strategies for LLM agents, including metrics for performance, latency, and quality.
• Context management. Expertise in advanced context management techniques, including retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), memory structures, and context window optimisation.
• Production deployment. Experience deploying and monitoring agentic applications in production environments, including scaling, monitoring (OTEL), cost, and token usage.
• End‑to‑end ownership. You’ve taken agentic systems from concept through to production and are comfortable being accountable for how they perform in the real world.

Nice to Have (or We Can Teach)

• Backend and event‑driven experience. Comfort with backend development and event‑driven architecture. Our stack includes Python, FastAPI, Postgres, Kafka, and MQTT.
• IoT or edge architectures. Experience with IoT, edge computing, or hardware‑adjacent systems.
• Retail or personalisation. Familiarity with retail technology, commerce platforms, inventory systems, loyalty programs, or customer personalisation.

How We Work

We're a startup, so this is a high‑intensity environment. The people who thrive here are curious, proactive, and love building. If you're happiest when you're creating, experimenting, and moving fast, you'll love it here. We draw our energy from being together, so this is an office‑based role. It suits someone who enjoys the quick conversations and shared momentum that comes from building together. Our office is on what we think is the best garden square in London, just a couple of minutes from Tottenham Court Road, so it's easy to get to and a great place to build.

What We Offer

• Direct access to our founders and a real voice in decisions that shape the product and company.
• Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
• 25 days' annual leave, plus bank holidays.
• A central London office.
• Team offsites.
• Cycle‑to‑work scheme.