Software Engineer (Platform)

About the role

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.