Senior Full Stack Engineer | UK

At Purple Dot, our vision for e-commerce is simple: Everything that gets made, gets sold. Nearly 1 in 4 products is never sold - leading to 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 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 NYC, Charlotte, and London - and led by second-time founders with a track record of acquisition.

The Job

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. You work on all shopper and merchant facing features of Purple Dot and implement them fully (there is no frontend/backend/infra split). In practice this means that one week you will be working on our shopper facing checkout, next week it might be the interactive merchant dashboards or one of backend APIs, integrations or data products.

You work closely with the rest of our (small - 6 people, all in London) 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. You participate in our lightweight process - code reviews, frequent deploys and daily standups. You keep in mind the availability, stability, and security of our services as we scale the number of merchants and transactions through the next two orders of magnitude. Like every other engineer you support the software we build, including out of hours (on a predictable schedule, no more than 1 week/month).

Why we think you’ll love working at Purple Dot

• Work with the founding members of a fast-moving, flexible, and focused team that has already taken one startup from an idea to a successful exit.
• You’ll have an opportunity to learn and grow very quickly, working alongside an unusually experienced team (senior and staff+ only).
• We have reached product market fit, our business is growing 3x+ YoY and we have committed customers that contribute to a cohesive and pointed product roadmap.
• Have a direct impact on our merchants and shoppers with everything you build, and spend a lot of time on writing and overseeing complex changes to core features instead of keeping the lights on.
• We are all in this for the journey and the experience and like to make it fun.

What you’ll need to be successful

• Have the willingness and the ability to own complex and impactful features throughout their whole development lifecycle.
• Be product-focused and have a pragmatic approach to engineering, prioritising delivering value to our customers.
• Have a desire to quickly release and iterate - you are happiest when the things you build go live.
• Have a growth mindset.
• An open mind and a willingness to stretch yourself and to learn new skills.
• As we scale we are discovering every day what does and does not work - you’ll need to be comfortable with learning from failure.
• Write and talk about complex ideas - and their progress - with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Listen and guide other engineers to reach consensus.
• 5+ years of working on frontend and backend systems exposed to the public.
• We are looking for someone with battle-hardened experiences of:
• Writing applications that interfaces 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 frontend frameworks - 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.
• 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 Stripe or Paypal.
• Experience with analysing data and building data-heavy features, or working on data warehousing and data analysis tooling.
• Experience building applications that integrate into 3rd party websites.

Equity options so that you can share in Purple Dot’s success.

£1500 per year to work out of our US office for a week.

£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 or over Zoom, the choice is yours.

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.

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!