Staff Software Engineer

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 user experiences on top of a platform that combines AI driven content delivery on autonomous edge devices on an IoT network, combined with the backend infrastructure of a cutting edge adTech platform. This isn't a staff role where you "work across the stack", you'll be an integral part of defining the stack.

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

• Edge & IoT: Experience with "Cloud-to-Edge" orchestration and managing state across geographically distributed systems.

• Containerised Workloads: High comfort level with Kubernetes and container orchestration in a CI/CD-heavy environment.

• 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.