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Staff Engineer
Staff Engineer - Supply Chain & Data
Sainsbury's DTD is looking for exceptional professionals to join their team.
We all want amazing work and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Consider the scale required to feed the nation, the volume of data, transactions, and variety involved. This demonstrates that ours is a modern software engineering environment by necessity. We have invested significantly in a Tech Academy and in establishing standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment, and promote ways of working such as Agile, Scrum, and XP. You can look forward to exciting opportunities in everything from AI to reusable technology.
Work alongside multiple teams on projects within the Supply Chain and Data space. Embrace challenges by driving tech design, up-levelling teams, maintaining high tech standards, and building relationships between domains to ensure optimal technical decision-making across the wider Sainsbury’s tech ecosystem. Naturally, enjoy being a hands-on developer, choosing where your skills make the most impact.
Through technology, we are changing the world for the better. Shouldn’t you?
Why Join Us?
We are a 150+ year-old business operating on an incredible scale. This includes data from over 10 million Nectar users, peak trading days like Black Friday that make Argos the UK's third-largest website, and supply chain integration that ensures the right products reach the right locations on time, every time.
The technology we use is state-of-the-art, whether we are deploying over 1,000 microservices into AWS, Azure, & GCP in the cloud, streaming billions of messages on Kafka, or building event-based solutions. This is where you can broaden your technical knowledge and help solve complex problems while using your Agile skills to develop our long-lived teams. As a Staff Engineer, you will help us deliver complex horizontal outcomes that extend beyond a single team or area. Throughout, you will collaborate with engineers and third parties to deliver high-quality, well-designed solutions.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Work with the Head of Engineering to set and achieve strategic goals and objectives; assist in evaluating and driving technical decisions, and planning team development and support.
- Collaborate with engineers at all levels, promoting technical standards, sharing expertise, and helping them identify the best solutions. Provide coaching and mentoring to set teams up for success and help them perform at their best. You will have the flexibility to use your judgment and feedback to choose the challenges where your contribution is most needed, helping our engineers be their best.
- Liaise with peers from other areas to broaden knowledge, deliver wider solutions, ensure reusability of tech and skills across different domains, and support each other.
- In essence, this role will see you act as a technical backbone, a point of contact, and a coach and guide. We have plans to expand our engineering entry programs, and we want you to be a significant part of that, ensuring we recruit the best talent and continuously raise the bar.
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Who You Are
You are an experienced and passionate engineer with expertise in Java and Kafka, possessing both technical depth and breadth. You can take initiative, evaluate risks, and drive continuous improvement to achieve optimal outcomes. You trust your judgment and analysis to contribute to complex decision-making.
You will also need the ability to integrate into your teams and support them by leading from your experience. Therefore, you should be strong in both technical and Agile mentorship, guiding the engineering vision and helping teams increase their performance.
Listening and interpersonal skills are vital for building relationships and influencing. Your ability to adapt and embrace challenges will be beneficial as you discover the diversity of our technology and help set a course for ambitious goals and bold changes.
What You Could Do In Future
There is significant scope for broadening your skills in this role, allowing you to move into different areas, cover diverse ground, and truly expand your understanding of how the business operates. When you are ready to take the next step, a Principal Engineer role would enable you to build upon everything you have already learned and achieved. Your technical understanding will remain crucial, but the focus will shift towards looking upwards and outwards – considering strategy, future direction, and solving problems across the entire technical organisation.
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In Return
You’ll Enjoy All This And More
- Flexible working - a tailored approach to balance working from home and office collaboration, with sensible freedom to shape your week and working hours, and offices in various locations.
- Colleague discount across our brands: Sainsbury’s, Argos, and Habitat.
- Health cover
- Holiday allowance
- Bonus scheme
- Pension plan
- Special offers on gym memberships, restaurants, holidays, retail vouchers, and more.
Benefits
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, welcoming everyone regardless of who you are or where you work. Here, there are always opportunities to try something new, whether as part of an evolving team or elsewhere in the business. We take development seriously and are dedicated to supporting you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues who go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we will offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:
- Starting with colleague discount, you can get 10% off at Sainsbury’s, Argos, TU, and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday, and 15% off at Argos every payday.
- We’ve also got your future covered 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 20% of salary, depending on our performance.
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You’ll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further, such as season ticket loans, an interest-free car loan of up to £10k, a cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay 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. If you ever need it, there is also an Employee Assistance Programme. You will also be eligible for private healthcare.
Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you, which is why we offer up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave, and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.
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