Senior Full Stack Engineer

📍 Location: London area, UK

💻 Type: Full-time

💰 Salary: £80-100k + equity options

About Us

At 🟣 Purple Dot, our vision for e-commerce is simple: Everything that gets made, gets sold. 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.

The Job

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 (e.g. when one of our customers runs a surprisingly popular launch of a new collection, our system went from).

• Complex state machine: we need to manage the lifecycle of pre-orders across many disparate third-party systems (ERPs, OMSs, 3PLs, Shopify, Stripe).
• Different use cases: pre-commerce solves many different problems for our customers, but that in turn means our customers use Purple Dot in different ways.

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, not just moving Jira tickets across a board. You will work on all shopper and merchant facing features of Purple Dot. Small, fast moving team: you will work closely with the rest of our (small - 5 people in London and 2 people in New York) 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. Lightweight process: you will participate in our lightweight process - code reviews, frequent deploys and daily standups. Responsible engineering: we already transact tens of millions each month. So 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. We value our sleep - FYI that you will be on call no more than 1 week a month, our systems are stable and out of hours pages are rare. This is a full-time role. We work in a hybrid model - you will be expected to work from our river facing office near the Monument station 2 days a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays).

What you’ll need to be successful

• Independence: we try to ensure that every large project has at least two people thinking about it, but we need to move fast and that often means having as many projects as there are engineers on the team. You need to have the willingness and the ability to own complex and impactful features throughout their whole development lifecycle.
• Product focus: prioritising delivering value to our customers over riding the latest tech hype train.
• Growth mindset: an open mind and a willingness to stretch yourself and to learn new skills (this may be new technology, more effective use of LLMs in your dev cycle, database profiling, or how to communicate more effectively). As we scale we are discovering every day what does and does not work - you need to be comfortable with learning from failure.
• Desire to release early and iterate: you are happiest when the things you build go live. We make heavy use of feature flags (and our test suite) to put things live in production before they are ready for general roll out.
• Effective communication: we’re a small team, with no (and no desire to have) BAs that gather requirements and work out the plans of what needs building. You will work with support team members, account managers and members of the sales team directly. You may sometimes interface with our customers directly. Therefore your ability to write and talk about complex ideas - and their progress - with technical and non-technical stakeholders is super important. As is your ability to listen and guide other team members to reach consensus.
• Relevant past experience: we are too small and moving too fast to give a junior engineer a good experience. 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 the 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 eco-system.
• Experience integrating with e-commerce ERPs, OMSs and 3PLs.
• Experience with payment infra such as Stripe or Paypal.
• Experience with machine learning - we have several “AI” features that are actually useful (and used) by our customers. Some are powered with LLMs, some are simpler statistical models built by us.
• Experience with data analysis technology and methods.
• Experience building applications that integrate into 3rd party websites.

Benefits

• £80k - £100k salary.
• Equity options - so that you can share in Purple Dot’s success.
• Private healthcare.
• £1500 per year to work out of another office for a week (we have 2 in the US).
• £1000 per year to spend on your own holidays.
• £1000 per year to spend on your own learning and development.
• £250 per year to spend on products sold through Purple Dot.
• Company MacBook Pro delivered in time for your first day.
• Sometimes there’s free food, sometimes there’s free travel.

How we interview

We run a simple process that we aim to go through in just a few days:

• (1h) Meet with Ryszard our Head of Engineering to learn more about each other and this role.
• (1h) Conversation about your current work - expect this to go into a lot of technical detail.
• (2h) Final stage when you will pair with us on a System Design exercise in our London office.
• (30 mins) Meet with John our CTO.

👉 Apply

Join Purple Dot and be a part of a team that is reshaping the future of retail. If you have a passion for driving customer success and want to make a meaningful impact, we’d love to hear from you! Apply through the platform where you saw this job advert, or by sending an email to hiring@getpurpledot.com with your resume / CV and LinkedIn profile and “Senior Full Stack UK” in the subject line. 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.