Software Engineer (Platform)

About Us

At algo1, we are 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’re backed by leading investors and founded by two entrepreneurs: one with a track record of building companies, and the other a leader in retail data and shopper analytics. Together, 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 who join now will have an opportunity to shape the product, the engineering culture, and what algo1 becomes.

The Role

This role reports to our Head of Platform, Jack. Working with him and the platform engineering pod, you'll accelerate the development of algo1's platform, turning enterprise-grade platform expectations into software that our product pods and customers rely on.

You'll work primarily in the backend and on the infrastructure that underpins it, but the shopper and retailer experience will never be far from your mind.

Delivering a great platform means product engineers can ship quality, scalable solutions; product, design, and non-technical colleagues can prototype ideas quickly using our application code and production data as a baseline; shoppers have responsive, personalised in-store experiences; and retailers and brands can configure, monitor, and analyse their campaigns across potentially billions of data points.

We're agentic-first. Every engineer has access to frontier AI tooling and our own coding harness, and we expect you to use them to move faster, attempt more ambitious work, and stay fully accountable for what you ship.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer, though Staff engineers and ambitious early-career engineers with strong platform instincts will also be considered.

What You'll Own

• Product security. Own authentication across algo1, retailer and brand employees, shoppers, devices, agents, and third-party services, alongside authorisation covering RBAC and ReBAC.

• Release engineering. Develop and maintain reliable, consistent automated release cycles that get changes to production safely and quickly.

• Cloud environments. Manage the environments that support prototyping features across our Android and web applications alongside changes to one or more of our backend microservices.

• API and event-driven architecture. Gatekeep the quality of our APIs, webhooks, and event-driven architecture in an open contributor model.

• Agentic enablement. Continually improve our internal agentic harnesses (skills, context, and tooling) that allow other engineers and less technical colleagues to develop and prototype on our platform.

• Agentic automation. Add agentic automation to all appropriate areas of the platform stack without compromising on quality.

About You

Must Have

• 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.

• 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.

• Real-time data. Experience processing or analysing real-time data streams at scale.

• Cloud infrastructure. Experience deploying and operating distributed services on AWS, GCP, or Azure.

• 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)

• Polyglot engineer. Professional software engineering experience across the stack, with your strongest work in the platform, and a portfolio of production systems you've owned end-to-end.

• B2B or enterprise product experience. Background building for business or enterprise customers, where reliability, integrations, and data pipelines matter as much as the interface.

• 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.

• Containers and orchestration. Docker and Kubernetes in production.

• 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 startup, so this is a high-intensity environment. 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 draw our energy from being together, so this is 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