Tesco
Senior Java Software Engineer - Quote API - Engineering Enablement
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About the Role
Join the Engineering Enablement team at the heart of Quote Modernisation, the most significant engineering transformations Quote has undertaken in recent years. Quote is the mission-critical pricing and promotions platform serving over 28 million UK shoppers every week across every channel, from tills to websites, with global reach on the horizon.
Our current monolithic architecture and ageing technology stack are significant barriers to productivity, stability, and innovation. We’re fixing that. The Quote Modernisation programme is built on five strategic pillars: architectural modernisation, technology stack revitalisation, quality and resilience, delivery acceleration, and engineering excellence. We’re aiming for 2–3x improvement in our ability to design, build, and release new product capabilities.
The Engineering Enablement team is central to this transformation. Operating under an ‘Enablement First’ principle, we lay the foundations before the broader teams build on them. That means creating the Micronaut application template, standardised logging and metrics libraries, feature flagging infrastructure, and quality gates that other engineers depend on daily. We work collaboratively across Retail and Technology to make sure we only build components that genuinely add value.
This role sits at the intersection of core Java engineering and developer experience. You’ll write high-quality production Java, but you’ll also care deeply about the experience of engineers building on what you create. That means investing in the clarity of our tooling, the speed of feedback loops, the robustness of our CI/CD pipeline, and how easy it is for a new engineer to be productive from day one.
You will be responsible for
Engineering Enablement
- Build and maintain the shared, standardised components that underpin Quote Modernisation including the Micronaut application template, feature flagging library, canary releases and standardised logging and metrics libraries.
- Drive adoption of these components across engineering teams, working closely with pilot teams to ensure they meet real development needs.
- Establish and automate quality gates covering code coverage, static analysis, performance, and security treating them as first-class citizens in the pipeline.
- Champion schema-first development and standardised build tooling to reduce inconsistency and cognitive load across services.
- Support the migration from self-managed infrastructure (Couchbase, Kafka) to managed cloud services, reducing operational overhead for engineering teams.
- Contribute to canary release infrastructure and feature flagging capabilities that decouple deployment from release.
Developer Experience
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- Identify and remove friction in engineering workflows: slow pipelines, flaky tests, unclear documentation, painful onboarding and fix them systematically.
- Champion and continuously improve the inner developer loop: build times, test feedback, and local development setup.
- Write documentation that engineers actually want to read: clear, concise, and kept up to date, including runbooks and architectural decision records.
- Gather feedback from fellow engineers on pain points and advocate for improvements backed by data, including DORA metrics and developer experience surveys.
- Treat our CI/CD pipeline as a product in its own right measuring, improving, and communicating its performance.
Core Engineering
- Design and implement robust, scalable systems using deep JVM and Java ecosystem expertise, including modern Java concurrency with virtual threads.
- Translate product and engineering requirements into well-structured, maintainable code.
- Write test-driven features following TDD and BDD cycles, with a focus on tests that mitigate real-world risk rather than just coverage numbers.
- Apply SOLID principles and cohesive design to build software that is easy to understand, maintain, and onboard new engineers onto.
- Support production systems, resolve incidents, and conduct blameless post-incident reviews that generate genuine learning and tracked outcomes.
People & Community
- Mentor and support fellow engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and psychological safety.
- Share knowledge across the wider engineering community through code review, documentation, and internal talks.
- Collaborate with product stakeholders and engineers across teams to shape features and architectural decisions.
- Prototype and evaluate new tools and technologies with a focus on developer productivity and engineering quality.
You will need
Essential
- Strong experience with Java 8+, including modern language features and JVM internals.
- Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
- Proficiency with both SQL and NoSQL databases.
- Proven ability to design and scale distributed systems.
- Familiarity with Agile methodologies: Scrum, Kanban, or similar.
- Exposure to reactive programming paradigms; willingness to move beyond them as we adopt virtual threads.
Engineering Enablement & Developer Experience Mindset
- You think about the build experience as much as the build output: fast feedback loops, clear error messages, and smooth onboarding matter to you.
- Experience owning or materially improving CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure Pipelines).
- Comfort writing and maintaining developer documentation: READMEs, runbooks, and architectural decision records.
- A track record of identifying toil or friction in engineering workflows and taking ownership to fix them.
- Experience building or contributing to shared internal tooling, platform capabilities, or libraries used by other engineers.
- Familiarity with DORA metrics and using data to drive engineering improvements.
- Bonus: experience with Micronaut, or building standardised application templates and golden-path tooling.
- Bonus: experience with eCommerce, pricing, or high-throughput API systems.
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What’s in it for you?
We’re all about the little helps. That’s why we make sure our Tesco colleague benefits package takes care of you – both in and out of work. Click Here to find out more!
- Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary
- Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus Bank holidays)
- Private medical insurance
- 26 weeks maternity and adoption leave (after 1 years’ service) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, we also offer 6 weeks fully paid paternity leave
- Free 24/7 virtual GP service, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for you and your family, free access to a range of experts to support your mental wellbeing
About Us
Our vision at Tesco is to become every customer's favourite way to shop, whether they are at home or out on the move. Our core purpose is ‘Serving our customers, communities and planet a little better every day’. Serving means more than a transactional relationship with our customers. It means acting as a responsible and sustainable business for all stakeholders, for the communities we are part of and for the planet.
We are proud to have an inclusive culture at Tesco where everyone truly feels able to be themselves. At Tesco, we not only celebrate diversity, but recognise the value and opportunity it brings. We're committed to creating a workplace where differences are valued, and make sure that all colleagues are given the same opportunities. We’re proud to have been accredited Disability Confident Leader and we’re committed to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process. For further information on the accessibility support we can offer, please click here.
We’re a big business and we can offer a range of diverse full-time & part-time working patterns across our many business areas, which means that we can find something that works for you. We work in a more blended pattern - combining office and remote working. Our offices will continue to be where we connect, collaborate and innovate. If you are applying internally, please speak to the Hiring Manager about how this can work for you - Everyone is welcome at Tesco.
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