Software Engineer - Affiliate Operations at Lyst · London

Lyst is a global fashion shopping platform founded in London in 2010 and catering to over 160M shoppers per year. We offer our customers the largest assortment of premium and luxury fashion products in one place, curating pieces from 27,000 of the world's leading brands and stores. In 2025, Lyst joined Zozo, operators of Zozotown, the leading fashion e-commerce platform in Japan. This partnership marks a bold new era for Lyst, as we accelerate our vision and work together to transform the future of fashion shopping through AI and technology.

At Lyst, we obsess over the customer, providing a search and discovery experience which offers inspiration, fulfilment, and personalisation. We believe that fashion is amazing but shopping for fashion often isn't, and we use our technology, data and creativity to bring more joy, greater choice and fewer fails. Our mission is to help fashion shoppers make better decisions and help fashion partners find better audiences as the category-leading destination for every fashion shopper.

About the Team

Affiliate Operations powers the technology that connects millions of shoppers with the world's leading fashion brands. Our squad builds the platforms, data products, marketing services, and bidding systems that drive business-critical customer acquisition, partner integrations, and revenue growth.

We are a highly data-driven engineering organization. We validate ideas through experimentation, measure success through business outcomes, and continuously improve our platforms using evidence. Our work involves large-scale data processing and distributed systems, requiring us to remain highly reliable while evolving to support new markets and acquisition channels.

Reliability is fundamental to everything we build. We invest heavily in automation, observability, and operational excellence to reduce manual effort. We are also exploring how AI can transform our engineering productivity and marketing platforms. We operate in a "You build it, you ship it" culture where engineers have significant ownership—from proposing technical solutions and shaping architecture to shipping features and operating services in production.

As a highly collaborative squad, you'll work closely with Product, Marketing, Partnerships, and Analytics to launch new capabilities and pioneer emerging opportunities such as Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO).

The Role

Build Revenue-critical Platforms

You'll develop and maintain the services that power Lyst's affiliate platform, from product data pipelines to bidding systems and integrations. Your work will directly support revenue generation while ensuring our systems remain reliable, scalable, and ready to support new markets and acquisition channels.

Collaborate

You'll work as part of a cross-functional squad alongside Product, Marketing, Partnerships, Analytics, and Engineering colleagues. Together you'll improve platform effectiveness, launch new capabilities, and reduce manual operational effort across the business.

Improve

You'll continuously improve our systems through better observability, automation, and thoughtful refactoring. You'll help evolve our architecture and engineering practices to ensure our platforms remain resilient as they scale.

Own

You'll take ownership of the systems you build, from design through to production. You'll contribute to technical decisions, participate in code reviews, and help ensure high standards of quality, reliability, and maintainability across the platform.

Within your first 3 months, you will:

You'll be fully embedded in the team, contributing to production systems and collaborating closely with Product, Marketing, Partnerships, and Analytics. You'll have shipped meaningful improvements to our platform, gained confidence working across our services and data pipelines, identified opportunities to improve reliability and automation, and become a trusted contributor to technical discussions and product delivery.

The Tech Stack & Culture

We work in a "You build it, you ship it, you run it" culture with a strong focus on engineering quality, automation, and operational excellence.

Our core technologies include:

• Backend: Python (primarily Django)
• Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, ECS
• Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, Snowflake
• Messaging: SQS, SNS
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
• Testing: Strong focus on automated unit and integration testing

Strong Engineering Fundamentals: Proven experience building production web applications using Python and Django, with a solid understanding of software engineering principles and modern backend development.

Quality Mindset: You write clean, maintainable, well-tested code and understand the value of automated testing, continuous integration, and long-term maintainability. You're comfortable improving existing systems through thoughtful refactoring.

Technical Curiosity: You enjoy understanding how systems work, solving complex technical problems, and continuously improving architecture, performance, and reliability.

Collaboration: You communicate clearly, enjoy working in cross-functional teams, and can explain technical ideas to both engineering and non-engineering colleagues.

Ownership: You take responsibility for the systems you build, proactively identify opportunities for improvement, and enjoy solving operational as well as technical challenges.

Growth Mindset: You embrace feedback, enjoy learning new technologies, and use data to validate ideas and improve customer outcomes.

Experience with React, TypeScript, GitHub Actions, AWS, modern CI/CD pipelines, or ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, or Salesforce Commerce Cloud would be a strong advantage.

- **Our Ways of Working:** We all come into the office on **Tuesdays** and **Thursdays**, with the option to work remotely or come into the office on the other days. We believe that in person collaboration and community spirit is super important, which is why we spend some of our time in the office and some of our time at home.
- **Time Off:** In addition to the 8 statutory bank holidays, you will receive 29 holidays per year. Lyst’s holiday year runs from 1 April to 31 March.
- **Competitive Family Leave Package:** This includes Enhanced Family Leave for those eligible, paid Time off for Dependents and Support for Fertility Treatment & Loss.
- **Clothing Benefit:** We want you to enjoy using the Lyst app and site as much as our customers, so we provide you with a clothing allowance to use on Lyst every year. This starts at £250 when you join and increases up to £1,000 with your length of service.
- **Private Healthcare:** Our healthcare provider is Vitality. Your health is important to us which is why we offer all employees a comprehensive healthcare scheme from the day you start.
- **Training Allowance:** We’re big on continuous learning and growth, so all employees are currently entitled to an annual training allowance of £1,000. This can be used to attend conferences, industry events, training courses and to purchase resources.
- **Pension Scheme:** Our pension provider is The People’s Pension. We offer a minimum employee contribution of 5% and 3% employer contribution.
- **Eye Tests and Vouchers:** Employees can make a saving on their eye test and glasses through our chosen provider. You’ll receive a free eye test every year and a discount towards glasses.
- **Cycle-to-Work Scheme:** Lyst will purchase a bicycle from your chosen retailer, you will then receive a voucher to pick up your bicycle from them.
- **Transport Season Ticket Loan:** Employees can apply for an interest free season ticket loan to support your travel to work.
- **Social Events:** Frequent company wide social events including Christmas & summer parties, sports days, themed drinks, quizzes, cook alongs, as well as smaller team socials. We also have plenty of interest based groups such as football, running club, book club, culinary and more.
- **Our Ways of Working:** We all come into the office on **Tuesdays** and **Thursdays**, with the option to work remotely or come into the office on the other days. We believe that in person collaboration and community spirit is super important, which is why we spend some of our time in the office and some of our time at home.

We want to build a world where fashion works for everyone, and we want teams that are just as inclusive. Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture at Lyst. We recognise and celebrate the value and impact diversity brings to our company and are committed to ensuring this is a consistent focus, for which we are held to account. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply for this role. We are happy to talk about flexible working arrangements.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Lyst we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.