Staff Engineer

About Us

algo1 is 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 are backed by leading investors and founded by experienced entrepreneurs in building companies, retail data and shopper analytics. 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 joining now will have a genuine opportunity to shape the product, the engineering culture, and what algo1 becomes.

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 everyday 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 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 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. Enable non-technical people 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.

• 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 are building a category-defining company. That requires ambition, intensity, high standards and a team that enjoys solving difficult problems together.

The people who thrive here are curious, proactive and energised by building. They enjoy experimenting, making decisions and turning ideas into products that people can use.

We draw energy from working together, so this is primarily an office-based role. Our office overlooks one of central London’s best garden squares and is a few minutes from Tottenham Court Road.

 

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

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