Staff Engineer

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 and scaling 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

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to own the full-stack development of algo1’s retailer- and brand-facing product suite.

You will be the primary engineering partner to our Head of B2B Product, James, turning ambitious and sometimes ambiguous product ideas into software that retailers and consumer brands rely on to create, launch, and measure campaigns.

This is a product engineering role, not an infrastructure or platform architecture role. You will be responsible for building the core B2B experience that enables retailers and brands to bring their campaigns onto algo1’s in-store product.

The quality of this software directly impacts the shopper experience. It is the layer through which offers and campaigns move from retailers and brands onto the in-store product. Getting this right means helping shoppers discover more relevant content while giving retailers and brands the tools to understand what works.

You will own the customer-facing web application and the backend systems that power it, including campaign creation, offer management, retailer onboarding, permissions, reporting, performance measurement, and the integrations that allow promotional and EPOS data to flow into and out of the platform.

You will work closely with product, design, and platform engineering teams, but you will be accountable for taking the B2B product from early concepts through to customer adoption, continuously improving it as we scale with retailers and brands.

What You'll Own

The most important requirement is clear evidence that you have personally built and shipped complex, customer-facing B2B software used by real customers.

• Own the B2B product area end to end, from early product definition and technical design through implementation, release, and iteration.

• Build intuitive retailer- and brand-facing web experiences using React and TypeScript.

• Develop the backend services and APIs that power campaign creation, management, reporting, and customer administration.

• Act as the senior engineering counterpart to the Head of B2B Product, helping shape scope, resolve ambiguity, set delivery cadence, and make effective product and technical trade-offs.

• Integrate with platform services built by our Platform team, extending them where needed rather than duplicating platform capabilities within the B2B product.

• Own retailer-facing integration touchpoints, including the flow of promotional and EPOS data into the system and campaign or performance data back out to customers.

• Design reliable integrations using APIs, webhooks, authentication, and data synchronisation patterns.

• Build responsive product experiences, including asynchronous and bi-directional interactions where they create meaningful customer value.

• Establish strong engineering standards within the B2B product area while remaining pragmatic about what needs to be built now and what can evolve over time.

• Use modern AI development tools to accelerate prototyping, implementation, testing, and iteration while maintaining strong engineering judgement and quality.

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