Head of Software Development - Recommendation & Personalisation APIs

What’s in it for you

We’re all about the little helps. That’s why we give our wonderful colleagues bags of benefits. Including wellbeing services, an award-winning pension scheme and much, much more, our colleague reward package keeps on giving. And helps make every day a little better for you and your family. These include but are not 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 Bank holidays)
• Buy holiday salary sacrifice scheme (for salaried roles)
• Private medical insurance
• Retirement savings plan - save between 6% - 10% and Tesco will contribute 1.5 times this amount
• Life Assurance - 5 x contractual pay
• 26 weeks maternity and adoption leave (after 1 years’ service) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, we also offer 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave
• The right to request flexible working from your first day with us
• Free 24/7 virtual GP service, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for you and your family, free access to a range of experts to support your mental wellbeing
• A Colleague Clubcard for you & a family member (after 3 months of service), giving you access to lots of discounts in-store & online
• Access to our colleague networks providing a space for colleagues to come together from a range of backgrounds. For more information about our colleague networks please click here

Click Here to read more about the full range of benefits we have available for our colleagues

About the role

This is a great opportunity to play a leading role in the service of millions of Tesco Online and Stores.

The Recommendation domain and Personalisation domain contains a set of critical strategic APIs that allow us to understand our customers, lead how we interact with them, and deliver better, more personalised experiences. Some of the core APIs include:

• Recommendation API: The Product Recommendation APIs provide suggestions to support upselling and cross selling of goods which will be based on such things as:
• Customers also bought, crowd sourced Recommendations, customer preferences, campaigns and offers.
• Product affinity, an approach made popular by Amazon, identifies items to present to a visitor based upon models such as, “visitors who viewed this bought that” or “visitors who bought this also bought that.”.
• Personalisation API: This system provides ranking capabilities to personalised content using different machine learning strategies. The system is designed to personalised different user experiences to provide the most relevant results when a customer search for groceries, or we want to personalise the content of carousels through the checkout journey.
• User Interaction Service API: This service allows us to have granular access and control over user interaction data. Allowing us to understand how our user interfaces are performing and whether they serve customers or colleagues as required. Identifying and sizing areas for improvement then measuring the resultant AB tests. Providing real-time connectivity for systems to measure performance.

We operate a data-led, agile product-based approach – balancing the delivery of daring change with our dedication to the highest possible standards of security, availability, and performance.

You will be responsible for

As a Head of Software Development at Tesco, you will be responsible for the engineering teams that build, run and support Recommendation & Personalisation APIs, and of course for the engineering qualities of the products within. You will have a team of around 35 people split across the UK and India. You will also have opportunities to supply more widely across Tesco Technology as a senior engineering leader.

Role Responsibilities:

• Cultivate an open, believing culture based on empowerment and continuous incremental improvement
• Define and drive a clear technical strategy for API solutions, working in close collaboration with Product Management
• Contribute to high-level trade-off discussions and roadmap prioritisation
• Mentor and grow the capabilities of our engineers, leading by example
• Take accountability for non-functional outcomes including security, performance, availability, and reliability. Our engineering teams operate with a DevOps approach, running what they build. This includes in and out-of-hours support.
• Work across Tesco Technology on wider technical initiatives and strategy.
• Drive continuous improvement in our technology, processes and ways of working
• Own the overall budget for the teams

You will need

• Experience leading, growing, and developing a distributed team of 30+, including leading managers.
• Consistent record of delivering impactful change.
• Deep knowledge and experience working across the full SDLC in an Agile / DevOps culture.
• Experience working in close partnership with product colleagues.
• Significant experience building and operating distributed software solutions at scale.
• Broad hands-on technology background - including practical expertise in API development, testing, Cloud infrastructure, databases (SQL and no-SQL), continuous deployment and operational tooling.
• Experience running PII data and/or working in secure/regulated environments (desirable).

Hiring Manager: Vishal Srivastava 

Recruiter: Lauren Baker

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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 proud to have been accredited Disability Confident Leader and we’re committed to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process. For further information on the accessibility support we can offer, please click here.

We’re a big business and we can offer a range of diverse full-time & part-time working patterns across our many business areas, which means that we can find something that works for you.  We work in a more blended pattern - combining office and remote working.  Our offices will continue to be where we connect, collaborate and innovate.  If you are applying internally, please speak to the Hiring Manager about how this can work for you - Everyone is welcome at Tesco.