Principal Software Development Engineer - Transport

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 of up to 45% of base salary
• Car allowance of £7,320 per annum
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus 8 Bank holidays)
• Retirement savings plan - save between 6% and 10% 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 (from April 2020)
• 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
• 25% off Tesco Café
• 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
• Health screening every 2 years
• Private medical insurance offered by Bupa
• Cycle to work scheme
• 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

In Transport and Tracking team, we build efficient algorithms for computing the transport schedules in Last Mile and Store Distribution domain. It helps us to reduce miles per store and therefore reducing the fuel and emissions from our fleet whilst providing the right products for our customers when they need it.

We developed highly sophisticated meta-heuristic algorithms particularly in Routing and Optimisation space, that comprises core components of a world class logistics and fulfilment Transport platform that enables to improve transport scheduling efficiency and accuracy and making sure that we are delivering orders on time every time.

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.

The Transport Platform is developed using Java, Springboot, React, Node, Couchbase and Kafka, among other technologies. We Design, Develop, and Run applications on cloud computing platform encompassing private and public clouds (AWS/Azure), at scale with fully automated testing and CI/CD pipelines.

The team works according to Agile principles, adapting Kanban and other techniques as appropriate to succeed. The team is humble, supportive of each other and highly collaborative both internally and with other teams, with pairing a common occurrence and all code is reviewed via Github.

You will be responsible for

Principal Software Development Engineer are the creative minds developing the software applications that make life easier for customers. They lead the entire development and support process for a software program with a mindset of API-first and DevOps attitude. They produce high quality working software that adds value to our customers, their applications improving the simplicity of tasks with the impact ranging from saving time, effort, or money to re-defining normal.

In this role, you will:

• Apply your in-depth knowledge of multiple programming languages, associated frameworks, and the tool ecosystem to create elegant solutions to problems.
• Adopt new languages and new paradigms and produce proof of concepts to evaluate new tools, applying them to the problem domain where they deliver significant benefit.
• Help define, build, and deliver Optimisation/Routing algorithms for our Transport applications
• Provide expertise around optimization techniques in operations research and machine learning
• Tune & enhance optimization solutions for performance & efficiency
• Lead group discussions on design and model multiple domains, articulating contexts and boundaries and the rationale behind them, shaping the wider application landscape.
• Work with product/Business teams to understand and translate their needs into improvements in the product, translating requirements into tasks and code and developing high-quality code that can lead to rapid delivery.
• Support production systems, resolving incidents, and performing root cause analysis.
• Share knowledge with the wider engineering community, mentoring and developing those around you to raise the bar of the organisation.

You will need

• A strong technical and people skill, with excellent collaboration and stakeholder management skills
• A track record of delivering large-scale, well architected web solutions at pace
• You drive and implement best practice improvements
• You confidently and competently impart knowledge to users, customers, and other team members
• Java, NoSQL, Kafka, JavaScript, NodeJs, and other modern technologies.
• Strong understanding of running production applications.
• Designing and building distributed systems, for scalability, availability, and performance
• Testing everything, automating everything

Experience relevant for this job:

• Previous experience of working in and across engineering teams in a similar role.
• Hands-on experience in the development of RESTful APIs and Data structures & algorithms, and distributed computing that work at scale.
• Experience of designing and building distributed systems for scalability, availability and performance.
• Experience of testing and automating everything.

Skills relevant for the job:

• A polyglot set of languages, frameworks, and technologies on which you can draw from your background of commercial experience with.
• A high degree of emotional intelligence; you are aware of your own emotions, how you appear and can self-reflect on your actions. You can empathise with others and modify your behaviour and style accordingly.
• Problem-solving, analysis and computational skills; you are comfortable crafting systems and reasoning about them. When solving problems, you take a detailed and logical approach to solving them and you retain ownership through to resolution.
• Customer focus: you can find the right balance between outcome delivery and technical excellence and place the needs of our customers above those of you and the team.
• Written and verbal communication skills.

About us

Our vision here at Tesco is to become every customer's favourite way to shop, whether they are at home, out shopping, on the move, anywhere in the world. 

We want our customers to be inspired and whatever they are looking for, we’re finding bigger and better ways to provide it. 

Everything is underpinned by our continuous drive for the best tools and technology to deliver our vision. We’re driving innovation and transforming our Technology to become the world’s leading retailer. 

We need people who share our ambition to deliver for our customers; Passionate and confident people willing to take the initiative and drive us forwards. In return we offer excitement, a great team, an excellent benefit package, and significant career development opportunities. 

Joining us means playing a part in defining; building and launching an ambitious roadmap of digital products that could affect the lives of millions of people over the years to come. 

If that sounds exciting, then we'd love to hear from you.