Software Development Manager - Web Apps

What’s in it for you

We offer excellent benefits that help make Tesco a great place to work!  These include but are not limited to:

• Annual bonus scheme
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (and bank holidays)
• Great colleague discounts and deals, saving you money on everyday purchases, utility bills for the home and more
• Retirement savings plan – save between 4% and 7.5% and Tesco will match your contribution
• Buy as you earn and Save as you earn share schemes
• Opportunities to get on – take advantage of our ongoing learning opportunities and award-winning training to help you achieve the career you want

About the role

As a Software Development Manager, you’ll be leading an agile team of software development engineers developing Tesco’s customer facing web applications. Working with Product Managers, you will be responsible for the future direction of the products that we build, solving problems and developing new features through quality, scalable, performant and maintainable technical solutions. The solutions that you will be responsible for will have a global reach, impacting millions of customers.

You’ll be a passionate, pragmatic Software Development Manager with an inquisitive mind who builds and motivates their team to make change for the better and most importantly put our colleagues first. Comfortable with modern engineering practices and open source development tooling and technologies, you’ll use innovation to improve the colleague experience and efficiency of your engineering team.

We build modern frontend applications using:

• Node.js, Express
• React, Redux, GraphQL, Styled Components
• Jest, React Testing Library, Enzyme, Cypress
• Docker, Microsoft Azure

We take responsibility for the software through its entire lifecycle. We practice continuous integration and delivery and support our code through to production and beyond. We work cross-functionally with Product, UX, UI Design, Analytics, API teams and more.

You will be responsible for

As a Software Development Manager your primary responsibility is to build and maintain a passionate, engaged and effective engineering team. You do this through taking a deep interest in the people that report to you by making sure they are happy, motivated and challenged in what they are doing. You devolve decision-making and provide the team with the psychological safety to move fast. You guide them to reach pragmatic technical solutions and keep yourself close to the code without becoming a blocker. You take ownership when things go wrong, but celebrate success collectively. In short, you act as a multiplier of your team’s effectiveness.

Specifically, you will:

• Foster the careers of the engineers reporting into you by finding opportunity for growth, coaching, addressing concerns and if necessary, implementing performance management.
• Grow the capability of Tesco Technology as a whole by becoming involved in our engineering hiring and being passionate about building high performing and diverse teams.
• Work closely with Product Management to identify and minimise risk within an outcome and help prioritise and evolve a workable technical solution ready for delivery.
• Represent your team within wider technical discussions across different stakeholder groups, and be effective in doing so by constantly broadening your understanding of our technology landscape.
• Take ownership for the delivery of specific outcomes, or work across wider groups in conjunction with programme management to deliver more significant outcomes. Drive us to constantly improve quality.
• Take ownership of non-functional outcomes, including focus on performance, availability, reliability and security.
• Continually look for how we can evolve and improve our technology, processes and practices.
• Adopt best practices in software engineering: design, testing, version control, documentation, build, deployment, monitoring and operations. Build flexible systems choosing simple, straightforward solutions over more complex ones
• Drive innovation and continuous improvement in technology and methodologies to continuously increase productivity and ensure that technology standards and best practices are maintained across each area of focus
• Drive the planning and allocation for the development of the defined technology roadmap and develop, implement and maintain a disaster recovery plan
• Take a data driven approach to engineering where all initiatives have metrics to help drive progress and determine success
• Monitor security of a dedicated area and continue to upgrade it; monitor application performance and review any application failures
• Manage and lead the team in challenging and pushing the boundaries of innovation and technology
• Anticipate and react to major technology changes to ensure the maintenance of company leadership in the competitive landscape, ensuring that Tesco is regarded as a leader and innovator in its field
• Establish technical standards and ensure adherence to them for product development and company operations
• Identify and evaluate new technology platforms that would help the Tesco achieve its objectives
• Ensure customer experience is 24/7 at optimum levels due to relentless tuning and performance improvement in the production platforms
• Participate in the development of the long-term development and business technology strategies including participation in decisions involving in-house vs. outsource and nearshore vs. far shore providers as well as build vs. partner vs. buy decisions on new products/functionality 

You will need

• Experience leading agile engineering teams of 6+ engineers and architecting complex responsive web applications  
• 5+ years of hands-on commercial software development experience in Technologies like React, Node, Javascript.
• Depth of professional software engineering experience and best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
• Awareness of current technology standards, industry trends, emerging technologies, and software development best practices
• Strong background in distributed systems working at scale
• Ability to handle multiple and competing priorities within a fast-paced environment 
• Understanding of working in a matrix organization and owning all operational metrics and support

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 a big business with diverse working patterns and many business areas which means that we can find something that works for you.  Everyone is welcome at Tesco.

We have recently announced that we are moving to a more blended working week – combining office and remote working.  Our offices continue to be where we connect, collaborate and innovate.  Talk to us about how this can work for you.

Note: Should you be successful in your application, your employment will be subject to and conditional upon you providing your bank account details on your agreed start date.