Head of Systems Engineering – Identity & Collaboration

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

The Head of Systems Engineering – Identity & Collaboration role is accountable for determining the strategic roadmap for their technical area Identity and Collaboration, whilst providing leadership for their team. In this role, you will communicate with employees, stakeholders, customers, vendors to ensure our company’s technologies are developed and used appropriately. With a solid technical background and an excellent and deep understanding of current technological trends and variety of business concepts, able to demonstrate strategic thinking and strong business acumen.

We are seeking a passionate and experienced Technical Head of Systems Engineering to lead a high-performing team of engineers focused on developing, implementing, and maintaining workplace technology solutions. You will play a pivotal role in technically driving the strategy and roadmap for identity and collaboration technologies, ensuring a seamless and secure user experience across Tesco.

You will be responsible for

•         Technically lead a team of engineers to develop and implement technology solutions that align with the company's strategic vision and business goals, while also identifying and evaluating new technologies for competitive advantage.

•         Lead a team of engineers responsible for developing, delivering, and maintaining workplace technology solutions. Collaborate with other engineering leaders to ensure seamless service delivery, project execution, and alignment across teams.

•         Monitor KPIs like user adoption rates for new collaboration tools and uptime for critical identity services to assess the success of technology/service deliveries.

•         Manage key stakeholders across a wide, complex enterprise to ensure alignment and address their feedback to drive continuous improvement.

•         Demonstrate a passion for lifelong learning and a commitment to staying current with the latest trends and technologies in workplace technology.

•         Demonstrate a strong work ethic and a dedication to continuous learning, ensuring expertise in evolving workplace technologies.

You will need

Skills as demonstrated by Systems Engineering Manager or prior experience of leading enterprise technology departments.
 

System Engineering Skills

An experienced, technical leader who can lead, structure and develop a high-performant team. Ensuring quality of design solutions, spanning multiple technologies within Workplace Technology, specifically identity and Collaboration technologies.

• Owns and drives the technical direction and success of assigned solutions, ensuring they meet functional,  performance, security, and business requirements.
• Demonstrate strategic vision, define Infrastructure strategy, and drive priorities within the delivery programmes to reflect the business strategic direction.
• Use personal experience and an innovative approach to support and plan for growth within Systems Engineering and translate it into a technology and team roadmap.
• Demonstrate commercial acumen and have extensive experience managing vendors and suppliers.
• Accountable for resource planning to ensure the successful delivery of projects and support across the team.
• Drive adoption of new tools and techniques being able to understand their value and impact.
• Drive innovation through transformation and Continual Service Improvement.
• Establish global standards and ensure these are enforced and adhered to.
• Manage vendor contracts, licensing agreements, and major life cycle upgrades.
• Responsible for hiring, objective setting, coaching employees, and support for individual's career growth.
• Cultivates innovative ideas and challenges the status quo.
• Adapt solution and processes to effectively enable productivity and collaboration in hybrid working.
• Understand and contribute to DR/BCP planning
• Strategies to mitigate potential risks that could impact system availability and functionality.

Leadership & Potential

Complementary Skills

• Collaborate across multifunctional departments to drive forward the development and adoption of existing and new technologies to the infrastructure stack.
• Collaborate with a wider area or teams to drive overall enterprise design.
• Motivate your team with clear expectations and provide recognition.
• Creating a positive and supportive culture in your team by promoting teamwork, work-life balance.
• During volatile and uncertain situations, able to anticipates and overcomes obstacles with a pragmatic approach to achieve goals and commitments. While exhibiting high responsiveness by reacting quickly and positively to significant and major events
• Develop skills and capabilities in the team through performance reviews (objectives, reviews, feedback, etc.), engagements (meetings, discussions, escalation, and resolution of issues), training and career development conversations.
• Build a culture of recognition and reward to build a positive and supportive team.
• Proficient in spoken and written English and comfortable communicating with senior stakeholders as well as engineers.

Drive

• Drive to succeed and deliver, and to see beyond the formal boundaries of your role.
• Willing to challenge others as well as yourself, and taking appropriate risks.
• Ability to bounce back and adapt to setbacks.

Judgment

• Anticipating and identifying issues and opportunities quickly, and responding with agility to changes.
• Identify criticality of issues, and understanding the business impact, and liaising with the right teams to resolve the issues
• Using a bigger picture perspective to approach issues  and make a decision with an open-mind
• Analyses organizational risks associated with the decision, including those with long-term impacts, before committing to action.
• Guide difficult decision-making processes and help the team to reach consensus.

Influence

• Be effective by Showing humility, using challenge, and feedback to improve
• Effectively navigating based on insight into the dynamics of the organization and the people around you.
• Able to impact, as well as to adapt your approach to connecting with, respond to, and persuade others across your business unit through influence.

Technology Understanding

Strong and deep understanding of the following:

• Identity solutions - Active Directory and Azure Active Directory
• Productivity and collaboration solutions – Microsoft O365 / M365
• Security solutions like – ATP, AIP, Intune etc.
• Certificate management – PKI and other industry standard external solutions
• DDI solutions (DNS, DHCP and IP address management)
• Generative AI – Digital Assistants (example Microsoft Copilot)
• File Technologies, Ondrive, Sharepoint, legacy file storage

Finance & Commercials

• Familiarity with business and financial principles, including managing budgeting and forecasting.
• Experience contributing or running RFP processes.
• Ability to support business cases by evaluating suitable products for their technology and commercial impact on Tesco and assist the business team in making the right decision.
• Understand how the procurement process works in Tesco and can effectively apply the knowledge in planning and influencing product roadmaps.
• With a good understanding of translating the maintenance cost of any services in engineering, analyse, explore, and identify opportunities to reduce the maintenance cost of services.
• The ability to negotiate vendor contracts

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.