Head of Software Development – Payment

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 of up to 45% of base salary
• Car allowance of £7320 per annum
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (and bank holidays)
• Private medical insurance offered through Bupa
• Retirement savings plan – save between 4% and 7.5% and Tesco will match your contribution
• Life Assurance at 5x contractual pay
• Buy as you earn and Save as you earn share schemes

About the role

We provide payment solutions for in-store, online and mobile that handle millions of transactions per day across several continents. We support a variety of payment methods including cash, credit/debit card and gift cards.

All our systems have high demands in respect of security, reliability and performance as you’d expect. We strive to operate effectively even in presence of significant network disruption so that our customers can get the food and other goods they need.

We not only develop but support and protect these solutions 24/7 as part of our DevSecOps philosophy.

These systems are a mix of old and new with various software architectures, the end-state being event-driven, RESTful microservices. Our technology stack is consequentially wide and varied:

• Cassandra, Postgres, Redis
• Kafka and Tibco
• AWS, Azure and Datacentres
• C# and Java
• Specialised Hardware Security Modules
• Splunk and Runscope
• Docker and K8S
• Various cash and card payment devices

You will be responsible for

As the Head of Software Development, you will lead the engineering activity creating an environment focused on long term sustainability. You will lead by example, and have responsibility for:

• Forming a team that is able to cover the software development and operational demands of the area
• Budget and delivery
• Driving continuous improvement of engineering practise

This role involves:

• A continual focus on adoption of best practices in software engineering: design, testing, version control, documentation, build, deployment, security and operations.
• Building flexible systems choosing simple, straightforward solutions over more complex ones
• Maintaining viable and practical disaster recovery capability
• Taking a data driven approach to engineering where all initiatives have metrics to help drive progress and determine success
• Mentoring and leading the team in pushing the boundaries of innovation and technology for the best possible customer experience and productivity, aligning to appropriate standards.
• Establishing technical standards and ensuring alignment to them for product development and company operations
• Ensure customer experience is 24/7 at optimum levels due to steadfast focus on performance, scale and robustness
• Participate in iteration of the long-term development and business technology strategies. E.g. in-house vs. outsource and near-shore vs. far-shore providers as well as build vs. partner vs. buy decisions on new products/functionality

You will need

Experience relevant to this job:

• Depth of professional software engineering experience and best practices across the full software development process.
• Awareness of current technology standards, industry trends and emerging technologies.
• Hands on expertise in many disparate technologies, typically ranging from front-end user interfaces through to back-end systems and all points in between
• Strong background in secure, reliable distributed systems at scale.
• Knowledge and experience of cloud technologies, (preferably AWS or Azure) and modern programming languages (e.g. Java, Python, C#)
• Experience with data stores (both relational and non-relational); service-oriented architectures and knowledge of best practice in secure systems construction
• Consistent track record in leading and evolving teams of software engineers through the full agile product development lifecycle whilst improving their capability.
• Ability to handle multiple and contending priorities within a fast-paced environment
• Experience of running and supporting software in production with appropriate use of metrics to judge service health.
• Understanding of collaboration in a matrix organization
• Experience in payment and retail systems would be a bonus but isn’t essential

Skills relevant to this job:

• Great at hiring and growing talent as well as experience leading teams (15+) of developers, ideally across multi-location sites
• Validated leadership skills and team development capabilities
• High propensity to problem solving
• Strong hands-on nature and ability to roll up sleeves to develop product, evaluate tools, diagnose and tackle technical problems
• Collaborative and self-motivated in approach
• Good business acumen and highly tuned judgment
• Ability to influence and persuade others with excellent communication skills and analytical ability
• Methodical, organised and action oriented in approach with a proven resiliency to cope with high pressure situations (e.g. release cycles)

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.