Senior Software Engineer

Full-time · Manchester (on-site onboarding, then hybrid) · £85,000/year

Hi — I'm the founder of A1 Tech Deals. We're a UK tech retailer taking on Amazon on their own turf: better prices on the tech people actually want, a proper UK storefront, real cashback, and a curated set of suppliers behind the scenes instead of a faceless everything-store.

And it's working. We've done £100M in revenue across our consumer and B2B business, we're growing fast, and our customers back it up — 10,000+ Trustpilot reviews and 5,000+ Google reviews. Here's the thing though: a platform this size — a storefront, two dashboards, and the payment and fulfilment pipelines behind them — is still run by a very small team.

That's why I need my first senior engineer.

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WHAT THIS JOB ACTUALLY IS

Most of your week will be building. But here's the part that makes this role different: nobody is going to hand you a spec.

Our sellers and our support team know exactly where the platform hurts — the order that won't sync, the report they rebuild by hand every week, the screen that takes ten clicks to do one thing. Your job is to get those problems straight from the people living them, work out what's actually worth building, and then build it end to end. If you need someone to write you a ticket before you can start, this isn't the role. If you like turning a vague "this is painful" into a shipped feature, it very much is.

You'll have a direct line to me and a lot of autonomy. You're the first senior hire, so you'll also set the engineering bar — how we test, how we ship, what "good" looks like — and help me grow a team behind you.

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WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

The whole stack, across four surfaces and the services that glue them together:

• Storefront — the customer-facing shop (Next.js / TypeScript)

• Seller dashboard — where our sellers manage listings, orders and payouts (React + FastAPI)

• Support dashboard — the tools our support team runs the business on (React + FastAPI)

• Services — payment sync (Stripe, PayPal), fulfilment and tracking, search, the financial ledger, and whatever we need next

It runs on PostgreSQL (Supabase) and deploys to Railway and Vercel. It handles real money and real orders every single day.

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YOU'LL FIT IF YOU

These are the things I genuinely need from day one — all four:

✓ You're full-stack and mean it — equally at home in a FastAPI/Python backend and a React/TypeScript frontend.

✓ You're strong with SQL and Postgres — you can design a schema, write a safe migration, and reason about what a query (or a lock) does under load.

✓ You own things in production — you deploy, you read the logs, you debug the live incident. Code isn't "done" when it's merged; it's done when it works for customers.

✓ You've worked in e-commerce or payments before — checkout, orders, payments, marketplaces. You know why this domain is unforgiving.

I'm not counting your years. Show me the range and the ownership and we'll talk.

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HOW WE BUILD

We build with AI in the loop — Claude Code and tools like it are part of how we ship at the pace we do, and fluency with AI-assisted development is a real requirement here, not a nice-to-have. I want someone who's already worked out how to get great, tested, reviewed work out the door fast with these tools — not someone I have to sell on the idea. We care a lot about tests, safe migrations, and not breaking the thing that takes the money.

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THE PRACTICAL BITS

• £85,000/year, full-time.

• Based in Manchester. For the first few weeks you'll be in the office with me every day — that's how I'll get you properly up to speed on the platform and the business. After that it settles into 2 days a week in the Manchester office, 3 days remote.

• You'll need the right to work in the UK.

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NOT FOR YOU IF

✗ You need fully-formed tickets before you can start.

✗ You want to specialise narrowly and stay well away from customers.

✗ "It works on my machine" is where your responsibility ends.

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HOW TO APPLY

Tell me about something you built end to end — ideally where you also worked out what to build, not just how. Skip the cover-letter boilerplate.

careers@a1techdeals.com

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