Sainsbury's
Staff Engineer - Test - Quality Engineering
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Staff Test Engineer – Quality Engineering
Why join us
We’re a 150+ year-old business that operates on an incredible scale. There’s data from our 10 million+ Nectar users, days like Black Friday that make Argos the 3rd biggest website in the UK, and supply chain integration that gets the right products to the right locations on time, every time.
The tech we use is bang up to date (state of the art), whether we’re in the cloud deploying over 1,000 microservices into AWS, Azure & GCP or streaming billions of messages on Kafka and 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’ll help us bring together those complex horizontal outcomes that go beyond a single team and area. Throughout, you’ll be working with engineers and 3rd parties to deliver high quality and well-designed solutions.
What you’ll be doing
- Work with the Head of Central Testing and engineering leaders to set strategic goals, evaluate technical options and drive decisions across quality engineering and testing.
- Work with engineers at all levels, promoting technical standards, sharing your expertise, helping them to find the best solutions while also giving them coaching and mentoring to set the teams for success and help them perform at their best. You’ll have flexibility to use your judgement and feedback to pick the challenges where your contribution is needed the most.
- Collaborate with peers across the organisation to broaden your knowledge, deliver cross-domain solutions, reuse technology and expertise, and support one another.
- Set the technical direction for quality engineering platforms, tooling and shared services.
- Design, build and evolve reusable capabilities that improve testability, automation and engineering feedback.
- Produce working software, including services, frameworks, libraries, integrations and internal engineering tools.
- Help teams embed automated quality controls, performance benchmarking and effective test architecture into their CI/CD pipelines.
- Guide engineering teams across component, integration, contract, end-to-end and non-functional testing.
- Promote practices that improve reliability, resilience, accessibility, observability and production readiness.
- Identify, evaluate and embed practical uses of AI and agent-based capabilities across the software development lifecycle.
- Lead complex technical investigations across systems, teams and engineering domains, using evidence to drive improvements.
- Create reusable patterns that reduce duplication and improve consistency across engineering teams.
- Work with other Staff and Principal Engineers to connect quality engineering with wider technology strategy.
- Coach engineers and technical leaders, strengthening their technical judgement and ownership of quality.
- Stay current with developments in quality engineering and software delivery, turning relevant technologies into practical improvements.
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Who you are
You’re an experienced, passionate engineer with broad expertise and deep technical knowledge. You take initiative, assess risk and drive continuous improvement to achieve the best outcomes. Your sound judgement and analytical skills enable you to contribute confidently to complex decisions.
You lead from experience, working closely with teams and supporting them in their day-to-day challenges. You’re a strong technical and Agile mentor who can shape the engineering vision and help teams improve their performance. Whether your background is in software, data, infrastructure or networks, you bring strong programming expertise and experience in software design and implementation.
Strong listening and interpersonal skills enable you to build relationships and influence others. You adapt readily to new challenges, navigate a diverse technology landscape and help set the direction for ambitious, meaningful change.
Essential criteria
- Strong programming skills in Java, JavaScript, TypeScript or another modern language.
- Evidence of building a platform, service, tool or similar software product.
- Strong knowledge of software architecture, APIs, distributed systems and cloud engineering.
- Experience designing, building and supporting CI/CD pipelines and modern software delivery practices.
- Knowledge of quality engineering across functional and non-functional testing.
- Experience designing or improving automation frameworks and test architecture.
- Experience applying quality engineering practices across areas such as performance, accessibility, observability and production readiness.
- Knowledge of how AI and agent-based capabilities can be used effectively and responsibly across the software development lifecycle, with a focus on quality and testing.
- The ability to experiment with emerging technologies and turn useful ideas into working capabilities.
- The judgement to balance delivery speed, technical quality and long-term maintainability.
Desirable experience
- Experience designing, building and operating internal engineering platforms, reusable frameworks or shared services used by multiple teams.
- Evidence of driving adoption and demonstrating the value of a shared engineering capability.
- Experience designing and embedding contract testing across complex, distributed systems.
In return
You’ll enjoy all this and more:
- Flexible working – tailored approach to balance your working from home and collaboration in the office, sensible freedom to shape your week and day working hours, offices in different 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
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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 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 pay day. 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 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.
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, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.
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 paternity leave.
Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
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