Staff Software Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: London

Employment Type: FullTime

About algo1

algo1 is a VC-backed stealth-mode company building behavioural AI solutions for the retail industry. Our platform is designed from the ground up, no legacy, no patchwork systems, just a clean slate and a clear vision. Our mission is to bring the intelligence of modern machine learning directly to the in-store shopping experience.

The Role

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll work at the intersection of Product, ML, and Engineering to design and build the retail stack of the future. You'll be building and owning the product our retail and brand partners use everyday for campaign & device management, real-time insights and analytics, and automated agentic workflows. This isn't a staff role where you "work across the stack", you'll be an integral part of defining the stack.

algo1 isn't a typical SaaS platform: our platform combines AI driven content delivery on autonomous edge devices on an IoT network with the backend infrastructure of a cutting edge adTech platform.

What You Will Own

• Full-Stack Application Architecture: Design, build, and scale high-performance, full-stack systems—combining modern backend services with responsive, high-performance frontends.

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Help define overall engineering standards, particularly as the relate to web front-ends. Lead deep design reviews, mentor mid-level engineers, and establish high technical standards across the organization.

Essential Qualifications

• Track Record: 8+ years of experience, with recent years spent in a Staff, Lead, or Principal capacity at a high-growth startup or a sophisticated scale-up.

• Full-Stack Mastery: Expert-level proficiency in modern backends (Python, Go, or Java) and high-performance frontends (React/TypeScript).

• Real-time Web: Mastery of async, bi-directional communication protocols and patterns (eg. WebSockets, SSE) to power real-time user-experiences.

• "AI-First" Mindset: You have optimised your entire workflow around agentic AI workflows and can teach others to do the same.

Nice to Have

• Distributed Systems: Experience designing and operating event-driven architectures at scale (e.g., Kafka, Pulsar, or MQTT).

• Domain Expertise: Prior exposure to the complexities of large scale retailTech, adTech, or marTech platforms.

If you’re excited by the idea of shaping the future of retail and eager to make a real impact from day one, we’d love to hear from you.