Systems Engineering Manager - Run and Operate

What’s in it for you

We offer excellent benefits that help make Tesco a great place to work. These include but aren’t limited to:

• Annual bonus scheme 
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus 8 Bank holidays)
• On-site state of the art gym at our Welwyn Campus with discounted “Gympass” membership & free health checks via Nuffield Health
• Retirement savings plan - save between 4% and 7.5% and Tesco will match your contribution
• Life Assurance - 5 x contractual pay
• Share Schemes – Join our ‘Buy As You Earn’ & ‘Save As You Earn’ share schemes after 3 months service
• Colleague Clubcard (including a 2nd card for a family member) after 3 months service
• Colleague Discounts:
  • 10% increasing to 15% after every pay day for a four day period, off most purchases at Tesco
  • 10% off One Stop
  • 10% off pay monthly & SIM only deals with Tesco Mobile
  • 20% off all F&F purchases
  • 20% off car, pet and home insurance at Tesco bank. T&C’s apply
  • 50% off complete glasses purchases & free eye tests (other offers available) at Vision Express
  • 50% off health checks at Tesco Pharmacy
• An exclusive deals and discounts website saving you money on everyday purchases, treats for the family, eating out and utility bills for the home
• Cycle to work scheme
• Shuttle Bus Service to/from Welwyn Garden City Station to Welwyn Campus
• Opportunities to get on - take advantage of our ongoing learning opportunities and award-winning training, to help you achieve the job and career you want
• Our Employee Assistance Programme helps you deal with life’s challenges
• Financial wellness - Tesco has partnered with experts to help you make the most of your money
• Get involved in a range of fundraising activities with our long-term charity partners

About the role

The Tesco Mobile Engineering team is a truly cross functional team responsible for both the functional software development as well as the running and operation of bespoke and product / SaaS based IT solutions.

You will be working within a very diverse team of highly motivated and talented individuals on business-critical software developments. Our teams are motivated and challenged, working in regular and sprints, across a range of technologies which together provide huge benefit to the wider business.

The Systems Engineering Manager helps to define and influence the technical roadmap for Systems Engineering. Works across squads to deliver the roadmap. Ensures that technologies are available and maintained. Discovers and implements new technologies to improve functionality, availability, cost efficiency, and stability for Tesco Mobile. Leads a team of System Engineers, manages KPIs and SLAs, and helps maintain the budget related to Systems Engineering, collaborating with vendors to ensure service and product delivery.

We have a number of squads covering our key technologies and responsibilities:

• Colleague squad – Responsible for the in-life customer support systems used by colleagues in Call Centres (Voice & Web-Chat) and our in-store colleagues at our Phone Shops.  The technology stack is primarily based on SalesForce Service Cloud with integrations to other systems, such as IVRs and other backend systems.
• eCommerce squad – Responsible for our customer (tescomobile.com) and colleague (Phone Shops and Call Centres) facing sales and retention platform.  The technology stack is primarily based on Adobe Magento and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) with integration to many back-end payment, billing and fulfilment systems. 
• Run & Operate Squad – Responsible for the infrastructure, monitoring / logging of all the Engineering systems and applications.  Also responsible for the software development tools and pipelines used across Tesco Mobile. 

You will be responsible for

• Leads a team of System Engineers
• Using specialist knowledge to set direction and lead the team
• Setting and defining standards and best practice along with implementing improvements to tooling
• Monitoring the platform across value streams and ensure platform capabilities are developed on in a consistent and coordinated approach.
• A trusted expert who is responsible for building up the right capabilities for their people, equipping them with the skills, tools, and standard approaches to deliver technical excellence
• Monitoring the level of technical debt and ensuring this is well documented, encouraging solutions to be developed that minimizes the impact to technical debt accumulation
• Independently solves complex cross-business technical problems
• Work with third party providers where necessary offering direction, support and documentation
• Creating business justifications for when and why platforms need upgrading and present these to Product Owners & Stakeholders when necessary in an articulate manner for an audience that may not be technical.
• Providing effective performance management processes and mechanisms for the System Engineers and measuring performance and improvement.
• Providing an inclusive environment where Engineers have freedom and safety to innovate, experiment, and learn from failure
• Providing open and effective communication channels leading to greater knowledge transfer within squads and across squads.
• Establishing a knowledge sharing community, where technical knowledge of the applications / platforms or other technical practices are shared, and will encourage individuals to share their knowledge
• Recruitment, development and retention of technical Engineers including career pathway development for all technical squad members.
• Provide line management duties for Software Development Engineers within their technical area with a view to focussing on coaching and mentoring techniques that align to agile principles.
• Serve as a senior coach and advisor to Squads. Remaining close enough to the Squads to add value and to be an informed manager, while staying far enough away to let them problem-solve on their own
• Support squad members and Product Owners in knowledge transition between both Squads and the wider Organisation by enabling clear and concise communication channels

Key stakeholders

• CTIO
• Engineering Lead
• Product Owners
• Cyber Security Centre of Excellent
• Architecture

You will need

This role particular role is for the Systems Engineering Manager in the Run & Operate area.As such, we are looking for the following skills & experience:

• Source code systems and branching strategies; Github and  Github Actions
• Containerisation technologies; Docker and Kubernetes
• Significant experience with cloud providers AWS and Azure
• Exposure in Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment techniques, approaches and tools, including experience with the GitHub and GitHub Actions
• Infrastructure provisioning (at least one of Istio, Terraform, Azure DevOps, CloudFormation)
• Observability and Application monitoring using New Relic, Grafana and / or Splunk
• Networking concepts - Bastion hosts, Reverse Proxies, Load Balancing, TLS
• IaaS, PaaS, Saas Automation