Sainsbury's
Head of Product - ML
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Head of Product - ML (HoP) at Sainsbury’s Tech
In Sainsbury’s Tech, we power the UK’s number 1 multi-channel, multi-brand retailer. Our product teams are made up of inspiring and multidisciplinary individuals who are empowered to solve hard problems in ways our customers love and serve the needs of our business.
The role is essential for leading the evolution and scaling of our ML and AI capabilities within the data space. You will define the vision for how internal and external users will interact with data-driven and AI-native products – from ML infrastructure (feature stores, model serving, experimentation) to emerging AI capabilities (AI gateway, semantic layer, RAG, agentic tooling). Working closely with engineering, data science and tech and business stakeholders, you’ll translate technical capability into product value, prioritise a roadmap which balances platform investment with user-facing impact, and act as primary voice of customer for AI/ML initiatives. This role requires equal comfort discussing technical architecture with engineers and articulating business value to executives.
The Head of Product - ML (HoP) is a critical leadership role, accountable for technology at the heart of our strategy; leading an experienced and talented team. Relentlessly focused on understanding, anticipating and exceeding customer needs, the HoP creates, drives and champions the long term vision for their product domain to achieve our overarching business strategy. This product leader is a customer-centric motivator who inspires and coaches, while guiding the organisation in the pursuit of value growth. The role is inherently cross-functional and works closely with engineering, architecture, various stakeholders and business.
The HoP will be responsible for multiple product managers who collectively look after ML and AI capabilities in Data space. They will develop product roadmaps aligned to outcomes, that require the HoP to coordinate within their team and across multiple areas.
The role needs a connected thought leader, combined with the ability to coach and guide stakeholders and teams to unlock future value. Ultimately, the HoP is impactful in developing the culture and skillset of the Product organisation, shaping and delivering the future value for customers.
What I need to do:
- Partner with key stakeholders to fuse critical capabilities to support business strategy and technology vision
- Develop the vision, strategy, roadmap and backlog for ML/AI products, focusing on customer experiences that deliver multiple strategic priorities, align to our technology strategy, respond to market changes and gets adoption.
- Bring together and present multiple requests into a coherent product vision.
- Own the customer and business value and ROI. Continuously make effective prioritisation choices to deliver the maximum value and return on capital for your product.
- Apply insight, data, research, and your own hypotheses on what questions to ask to ensure your team are focused on making the biggest difference for customers and the business.
- Take accountability for end-to-end delivery, ensuring work is prioritised across multiple teams and divisions and is in line with the business strategy. Make appropriate trade-offs and prioritisation decisions to ensure the maximum value is achieved and delivered at pace.
- Lead real horizontal collaboration to build and evolve the product covering multiple business and tech domain needs
- Define outcomes for your product and contribute to setting and defining metrics and the north star for the product family
- Build, lead, coach and motivate a team of Product Managers; support them with definition of long-term priorities, guiding their focus as they build a vision and actionable backlog with associated benefit/investment cases
- Nurture talent in the team and foster a learning culture and high trust
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
How I will succeed:
- Be the champion for your product area, determining the right level or type of material to communicate the experience, benefits and long-term vision across a variety of audiences including development teams, stakeholders at all levels, partners and external parties.
- Be the arbitration and escalation point for prioritisation and trade-offs within your product area/end-to-end journey you are responsible for.
- Maintain a good level of awareness, interest and understanding of the existing and future end-to-end technology stacks/interfaces, including communicating clearly and coaching others on where and how to develop these technologies so they work seamlessly for customers and colleagues.
- Ensure that the team maintains a realistic 90-day roadmap, as well as a prioritised and estimated full year backlog, regularly communicating progress and proactively managing risks/issues to remove blockers. Support the team in understanding future risks to mitigate. Ensure alignment of your roadmap with other Product areas.
- Support communication and resolution of live product incidents and effectively prioritise, coordinate and communicate the resolution of production issues.
- Maintain a highly collaborative relationship with engineering, support at all levels for teams to understand and work together to solve problems for our customers and the business.
- Collaborate with the Director of Product, and other Heads of Product across the business to ensure consistency, drive overall strategic business outcomes/shared objectives, and continuously improve product management across the division.
- Develop a strong team of product managers, building the competency and enhancing the craft within the community. This includes developing a culture of learning, empowerment, experimentation and collaboration.
- Drive the team and their products towards the future organisation aspirations, through constructive challenge and thought leadership, fostering a culture where our customer ambition inspires the team to aim high and deliver at pace.
What I need to know:
- Proven experience shipping ML/AI-powered products or platform capabilities (data platforms, recommendation systems, LLM-powered features, model serving platforms)
- Strong technical fluency – able to engage deeply with engineering on architecture trade-offs (data pipelines, ML infrastructure, AI gateways, semantic layers)
- Track record of building and prioritising a product roadmap balancing platform/infrastructure investment against use-facing features
- Experience working with both internal (developer/data scientist) and external customer personas
- Strong stakeholder management skills – able to align engineering, data science, executive leadership around a shared vision
- Contributing and articulating the ML/AI strategy to various stakeholders
- Data-informed decision making – comfortable defining and tracking product metrics/KPIs for platform adoption and impact
- Experience managing and mentoring product managers
What I need to show:
- Creating a positive and consistent impact with internal and external audiences; excellent stakeholder management skills, ensuring senior stakeholder advocacy for your product family
- Customer focus, including a relentless focus on understanding, anticipating and exceeding their customers' needs and the ability to collaborate effectively with customers and stakeholders
- Commercial acumen, including understanding of the commercial drivers that determine the viability and longevity of a product, the ability to determine return on investment and use this insight to inform prioritisation, taking market context into consideration.
- Data driven, including a drive for the use of product metrics to prioritise a roadmap effectively and the ability to use data and insight appropriately to make informed decisions whilst mitigating for any possible limitations and/or risks of misinterpretation
- Strategic vision, including the ability to create, drive and champion a long-term product vision in line with a business strategy, the capability to anticipate the implications of how a product vision could interplay with a wide range of teams and the ability to drive collaboration with others to deliver effectively.
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
#LI-SE1
RESPONSIBILITIES
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety involved. Then you’ll realise this is a modern software engineering environment, because it has to be. We’ve made significant investment in the standards and principles that shape how we work. We iterate, learn, experiment and champion ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to exciting opportunities across everything from AI to reusable tech.
QUALIFICATIONS
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 65% of salary, depending on how we perform (in cash and shares).
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before payday) as well as access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. You'll also receive a company car cash allowance unless you are going to travel 10,000 business miles in your role, then you'll be able to choose a car. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.
Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London