Software Engineer - Affiliate Operations

About this role

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 Requirements 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. Benefits 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. Ti