Staff Engineer in London

About Us

At algo1, we are reinventing an experience that touches billions of lives every week, the in-store grocery trip. Our platform understands each shopper, responds to their context in real time, and turns an everyday experience into a more personal and engaging one. Retailers know an enormous amount about their shoppers through decades of loyalty schemes and analytics, but the impact on the actual in-store shopping experience remains limited. We're backed by leading investors and founded by two entrepreneurs, a serial company builder with a track record of category-defining companies, and a retail data and analytics leader whose work has shaped how some of the world's largest grocers understand their shoppers. Together, they've built a team of frontier AI researchers and engineers, product and strategy leaders, and senior operators from some of the UK's and the US's most important grocery businesses. The people who join now will help shape what algo1 becomes before the rest of the world catches on.

The Role

This role reports to our Chief Technology Officer, Julius, and works in close partnership with our Engineering, Product, and Platform teams. You will build the product our retail and brand partners use every day for campaign & device management, real-time insights and analytics, and automated agentic workflows.

What You'll Own

• Technical delivery of the B2B roadmap. Lead delivery of the roadmap that gets us through customer demos, trials, and onboarding for both retailer and brand partners.
• Full stack delivery end-to-end. Own substantial features from product conversation through design, implementation, and iteration in production. Most of the weight sits in the backend, but you go as far up the stack as the feature needs.
• Product partnership. Work in a cross-functional team alongside our Head of B2B Product, prototyping and validating ideas quickly, then shipping the ones that hold up.
• API design and evolution. Design and evolve the APIs your product surface depends on, making the trade-offs between clean interfaces, performance, and speed of delivery.
• Architecture calls. Own the architecture decisions on the surfaces you build, and work alongside the platform team on the bigger calls that shape how the whole system fits together.
• Standards and enablement. Set the technical and cultural bar across the team and the wider company, and make it possible for non-technical people to prototype on the codebase without putting the production code at risk.
• Production quality. Own testing, observability, and post-release investigation for what you ship.

About You

Must Have

• Full stack with backend depth. Professional software engineering experience across the stack, with your strongest work in the backend: Python, Go, Java, or similar, and a portfolio of production systems you've owned end-to-end. You build the interface yourself when the feature calls for it.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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)

• B2B or enterprise product experience. Background building for business or enterprise customers, where reliability, integrations, and data pipelines matter as much as the interface.
• Frontend craft. Comfort with a modern frontend framework (React, TypeScript, or similar) and an eye for interfaces that feel considered rather than merely functional.
• Cloud infrastructure. Experience deploying and operating distributed services on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Containers and orchestration. Docker and Kubernetes in production.
• Real-time data. Experience processing or analysing real-time data streams at scale.
• 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're a start-up and we're here because we want to build this. That takes real ambition, real pace, high intensity, and the kind of team you want next to you every day. 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 care about the people we're building alongside, and it shows in our small daily decisions, the calls we make when things get hard, and how we treat each other when no one is watching. We draw our energy from being together, so this is primarily 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 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.