Full Stack Engineer/Agile Engineer in London

Location: London area, UK

Type: Full-time

At Purple Dot, our vision for e-commerce is simple: Nearly 1 in 4 products is never sold - resulting in major losses and massive waste within the industry. We believe this problem exists because of lack of control and flexibility over when brands can sell - with long, fixed timelines where brands have to wait until stock is at the warehouse to start selling. It’s time for a radical shift in how e-commerce operates.

Purple Dot is pioneering the pre-commerce category: helping brands sell earlier - before inventory arrives - to increase sell-through, reduce waste, and drive profitability. Whether stock is 1 day or 1 year away, our platform enables smarter, faster sales that reduce risk and unlock new growth. Trusted by over 100 leading brands including Mattel, McLaren, New Era, Limited Run Games, and Oh Polly, we process tens of millions in pre-orders every month and are proudly leading the category out front. Backed by top investors like OpenOcean, Connect, and Unusual Ventures, we’re a 22-person team based in London, NYC and Charlotte - and led by a second-time founding team with a track record of acquisition.

Extending e-commerce with Purple Dot is technically complex and exciting!

• High concurrency: we need to handle massive, sometimes unpredicted spikes in traffic that must not result in oversell.
• Complex state machine: we need to manage the lifecycle of pre-orders across many disparate third-party systems (ERPs, OMSs, 3PLs, Shopify, Stripe).
• As a Senior Full Stack Engineer, your goal is to grab ideas for new features for our pre-commerce platform and turn them into reality, as quickly and with as much quality as makes sense at the time.
• True Autonomy: we don’t have a frontend/backend/infra split, you will be architecting solutions end-to-end.
• Small, fast moving team: you will work closely with the rest of our engineering team on scoping, breaking down and planning the implementation, then shipping the required code independently or leading a small temporary team formed for the duration of that project.
• Responsible engineering: we need to keep in mind the availability, stability, and security of our services as we make changes or add new features and scale to more users.
• Career trajectory: joining this small team is a massive opportunity for impact and helping shape not just what we build but also how we do it, with a future opportunity to mentor the next wave of mid-level hires after Series B and growth towards a Staff Engineer role.
• Support what we build: like every other engineer you will support the software we build, including out of hours. This is a full-time role.
• Independence: we try to ensure that every large project has at least two people thinking about it, but we need to move fast.
• Growth mindset: an open mind and a willingness to stretch yourself and to learn new skills.
• Effective communication: you will work with support team members, account managers and members of the sales team directly.

We are looking for someone with real life experiences of shipping frontend and backend internet facing systems:

• Writing applications that interface with large SQL databases - we use Postgres.
• Running applications on cloud platforms (we use AWS).
• Integrating 3rd party software into a user facing software stack.
• Familiarity with some frontend framework - we use React.js/Next.js.
• Either good existing knowledge or ability to pick up TypeScript very fast - we are a polyglot team but majority of our code is in .ts.
• You will work on frontend in this role but you will be most successful if your experience to date focused primarily on the backend.

Bonus points for:

• Experience with e-commerce platforms like Shopify or Salesforce and their app ecosystem.
• Experience with machine learning - we have several “AI” features that are actually useful (and used) by our customers.
• Experience with data analysis technology and methods.
• Experience building applications that integrate into 3rd party websites.

Benefits include private healthcare, £1500 per year to work out of another office for a week, £1000 per year to spend on your own holidays, and sometimes free food or travel.

We are an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.