Engineering Manager

Why join us

Joining Sainsbury's Tech means becoming part of an inclusive and driven team that is passionate about creating innovative solutions. As an Engineering Manager, you will play a pivotal role in leading and coaching talented engineering teams, driving the delivery of impactful solutions that drive efficiency and enhance performance across the business. With a focus on continuous improvement, you will have the opportunity to shape a world-class engineering function and contribute to the development of cutting-edge processes and technologies.

At Sainsbury's, we value collaboration, diversity, and inclusivity, and offer a supportive and inspiring environment where you can make a purposeful contribution. Join us to be a part of an organisation that fosters technical excellence and embraces the power of diversity to shape the technology landscape of a leading UK retailer.

About the team

The team consists of Software Engineers within our Data Platforms & Capabilities domain. They develop and operate centralised tooling and platforms that enable data producers and consumers to efficiently create, access and interact with trusted data products across Sainsbury's. The team plays a key role in standardising engineering practices, patterns and technologies, building scalable, secure and resilient platforms that reduce the need for bespoke engineering solutions and accelerate the delivery of business value.

What you'll do

You will play a vital role in leading and enabling the delivery of technology solutions that create value, drive efficiency, and increase performance for the business.

You will line manage and guide a multi-skilled engineering team, ensuring they have the necessary resources and skills to deliver end-to-end technical solutions for products.

Your responsibilities include mentoring and coaching your team members, recruiting diverse and talented individuals, and promoting a culture of collaboration, learning, and respect.

You will work closely with Product Managers and Engineers to define the vision and technical direction of the products, as well as manage multiple deliveries and take end-to-end ownership of your products, including change management and service management.

Driving the development of new features, promoting best engineering practises, and advocating for agile / lean delivery methodologies are also essential aspects of your role.

Additionally, you will manage initiative-level budgets, ensure adherence to processes and standards, and demonstrate positive attitudes and behaviours that contribute to a culture of excellence and inclusivity.

Who you are

• You are a passionate and experienced engineering leader with a deep understanding of engineering practises and a talent for coaching and developing teams.
• With a strong understanding of technology environments, you lead by example and inspire your colleagues, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Your technical expertise combined with your ability to prioritise and manage multiple deliveries, enables you to drive the successful development and delivery of large-scale platforms.
• You excel in making well-informed technical decisions and implementing best practises, while also managing Capex and Opex responsibilities.
• With your strong leadership and communication skills, you build strong relationships at all levels and contribute to the inclusive and diverse culture that Sainsbury's Tech values.

Essential Criteria

Proven experience leading, coaching and developing multi-skilled engineering teams responsible for business-critical products or platforms.

Strong technical understanding of modern software, data and platform engineering, with the credibility to guide engineers, challenge designs and make informed technical decisions.

Experience owning the end-to-end delivery and operation of a large-scale cloud platform, including roadmap delivery, resilience, security, service management and continuous improvement.

Strong understanding of enterprise data ingestion, including batch, streaming and event-driven patterns, alongside data quality, observability, metadata, lineage and access control.

Experience improving platform adoption and developer experience through standardised patterns, self-service capabilities and effective stakeholder engagement, while using measures such as reliability, adoption and onboarding speed to demonstrate value.

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.

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:

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).