Purpose
The Senior Customer Engineer is a Full-Stack Engineer responsible for the technical direction and implementation of all of Abel & Cole's customer-facing technologies. The role comprises hands-on software development as well as technical leadership and contribution to systems architecture. The Senior Customer Engineer plays a key role in shaping and implementing best practice to ensure a smooth Software Development Lifecycle across a broad range of products. It's an excellent role for an engineer who wants to grow their range across web and mobile and all the technologies that support them.
Our Tech Stack
- Web: Next.js, TypeScript, Zustand, SCSS, React Testing Library, Storybook
- Mobile: React Native, TypeScript, React Navigation, React Hook Form, Reanimated, Firebase, Braintree
- Backend: .NET API (OpenAPI/Swagger)
- Testing & CI/CD: Jest, React Testing Library, Azure DevOps, CodePush
- Environment/Platform: Azure Cloud, templated infrastructure
Key Responsibilities
- Development and maintenance of several customer-facing products, including websites and mobile apps written with Next.js and React Native.
- Integration of our REST APIs using typed, code-generated (OpenAPI/Swagger) clients.
- Contribute to our APIs — extending, updating, and maintaining the backend endpoints that power both platforms (.NET).
- Own features end-to-end — from technical design through delivery, release, and monitoring.
- Provide technical leadership and hands-on guidance to the engineering team, setting coding standards, architectural direction, and best practices across the codebase.
- Identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and reliability issues in existing systems.
- Champion best practices across development, DevOps, and security.
- Help maintain and improve app store releases and multi-environment builds.
- Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to prioritise the roadmap, balancing new feature delivery against consistency of service.
- Mentor mid- and junior-level engineers through code review, pairing, and technical guidance.
- Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and QA in an agile team.
- Evaluate and recommend new tools or frameworks that could improve team velocity or system capability. Monitor developments of the frameworks in use.
Key Skills & Competencies
- Significant commercial experience as a full-stack engineer, with strong TypeScript.
- Proven experience with React and React Native, including shipping apps to the App Store and Google Play.
- Experience building web applications with Next.js (or strong React web experience).
- Solid understanding of consuming REST APIs (experience with a .NET backend a plus).
- Experience with state management using React Context and hooks.
- Strong automated testing habits — Jest, React Testing Library.
- Confident with Git and CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps ideal).
- Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset to ensure teams grow their skills together.
- Familiarity with Agile practices and how they relate to the Software Development Lifecycle.
Desirable Skills and Experience
- SQL / relational database experience (writing and optimising queries, working with schemas).
- Native mobile experience — iOS (Swift/Objective-C, CocoaPods) and/or Android (Kotlin/Java, Gradle), including building or maintaining native modules.
- In-app payments integration (Braintree, Stripe, or similar).
- Firebase (Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging/push, Remote Config, Analytics, Performance).
- Animation libraries (Reanimated, Lottie).
- SCSS / modern CSS, and state tooling such as Zustand.
- Experience integrating customer engagement platforms (e.g. Insider, DynamicYield, etc.).
- Mobile performance profiling and crash triage.
Personal Attributes
- Bold, genuine, and collaborative — reflects Abel & Cole's friendly, supportive, and irreverent culture.
- Takes ownership of features end-to-end, from technical design through to delivery and monitoring, and takes pride in the quality and reliability of what's shipped.
- Comfortable balancing hands-on delivery with technical leadership and architectural decision-making.
- Good agile leadership qualities, skilled in helping teams arrive at decisions, with a strong affinity for Scrum values and putting the team and its goals first.
- Enjoys mentoring and helping colleagues grow, with strong written and oral communication and the ability to build relationships with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Curious and enthusiastic about new tools, frameworks, and development methodologies, with a strong desire to keep growing personal skills and industry knowledge.
- Disciplined and independent self-management skills, able to work to deadlines and standards with a minimum of supervision.
- Excellent problem-solving skills and the initiative to find innovative technical solutions.
Key Relationships
Developers and Automated Test Engineers (day-to-day collaboration within the Customer Technology team); Product Team (feature prioritisation and roadmap direction); Design and QA (agile delivery of customer-facing products); mid- and junior-level engineers (mentoring and technical guidance); cross-functional stakeholders (balancing new feature delivery against consistency of service).
About Abel & Cole
The Senior Customer Engineer will work with developers and automated test engineers in a team that looks after the shopfront of a constantly changing e-commerce business. They will be guided by our Product Team to develop the most valuable features to make our services easier to use and attractive to customers both new and longstanding.
Abel & Cole is an award-winning online food retailer with its head office based in London. Famous for our seasonal organic fruit & veg boxes, we deliver a wide range of excellent organic food to over 40,000 people's homes every week across London and the South, the Midlands and the Northwest. No air freighting, no silly packaging, no nasty chemicals — just great food produced by people who really love what they do.
We consider ourselves bold, irreverent, genuine, friendly and honest, representing a refreshing alternative to supermarket shopping, but without being preachy — this is true of our brand and our internal culture, which combines friendliness, supportiveness and humour with outstanding levels of achievement at work.
