Principal Software Development Engineer (Machine Learning Engineer)

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

We know life looks a little different for each of us. That’s why at Tesco, we always welcome chats about flexible working. Some people are at the start of their careers, some want the freedom to do the things they love. Others are going through life-changing moments like becoming a carer, nearing retirement, adapting to parenthood, or something else. So, talk to us throughout your application about how we can support.

We have an exciting opportunity for a Principal Software Development Engineer (PSDE) to join our Data Science Engineering space!

Bringing your strong expertise in machine learning engineering you will be a senior technical authority, delivering value that materially changes outcomes for the company.  Your job will not just be about technical judgement but also about influencing others to deliver results.

About the Team:

Within Tesco Data Science & Analytics, we help our customers and the communities where we operate get the most value from data. We build and run Tesco’s data platforms, we architect and engineer data onto these platforms, provide capabilities and tools to the analytics community across Tesco, and develop data products at scale. 

Our Data Science teams are involved in a broad range of projects, spanning across supply chain, logistics, store and online.  These include projects in the areas of Operations Optimisations, Decision Support (e.g. Forecasting), Online (e.g. Search and Recommendation) and Intelligent Edge (e.g. Computer Vision).   Our Data Science Engineers work alongside our data scientists, helping with everything from development of tools and platforms, code optimisations through to deployment of solutions on the edge, cloud and big-data environments.

You will be responsible for

As a Principal Software Development Engineer within Data Science Engineering you will:

• Play a key role in shaping large parts of Tesco’s technical landscape.
• Contribute to strategic planning, combining business vision and industry best practices to define technical strategy and make decisions.
• Be involved in a number of projects associated with ongoing and new use cases.  You will guide large complex programmes of work, working with and influencing the engineering, product, programme, and business teams.
• Own the design, implementation, and delivery of software that shapes products and technologies.
• Set technical direction to translate strategy into action, making a significant impact to the organisation.
• Be a thought leader for large and complex areas, typically working across multiple teams, setting standards for engineering excellence and efficient technical design.
• Be hands-on, guide teams to improve technology across product portfolios, infrastructure, and processes.
• Helping teams resolve hard problems, being hands on with design and coding
• Use your depth of skill and experience to enable multiple teams around you to deliver excellent software quickly.
• Influencing build vs buy decisions, deprecate legacy software, and lead significant refactoring.   You will help make the right trade-offs to influence the roadmap and sequencing of work to deliver early and often.

• Influencing others through strong communications skills, combined with sufficient breadth and depth of technical knowledge,
• Leading stakeholders and teams to appropriate decisions with data points and foresight.
• Build strategy documents, designs and code which are exemplary and serve as a model for others.
• Innovate and stay ahead of industry trends, competition, and new paradigms and share appropriately.
• Routinely come up with PoCs to evaluate approaches or technology choices to enable or accelerate programmes.

You will need

You come from either an Engineering or Data Science background, with a good understanding of the Data Science Toolkit (Programming, Machine Learning, MLOps etc) and bringing data science solutions into production.  You therefore tick the majority of the following points:

• A strong team player who works collaboratively with other members of the team, with experience working in a global team distributed across multiple locations.
• Very strong understanding of the Software Development Lifecycle.
• The ability to influence technical teams and senior stakeholders
• Demonstrable success from working across large engineering organisations, in and across engineering teams in a principal, technical lead or similar role.
• Demonstrated experience designing, developing and running whole system landscapes.
• Experience acting as a technical authority across multiple domains and multiple technologies.
• Experience proposing architectural patterns for adoption by an organisation.
• Experience guiding large programmes of work, with a track record of driving technical change.
• Problem solving, analysis and computational skills. You are comfortable designing systems and reasoning about them. When tackling problems, you take a thorough 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. You place the needs of our customers above the needs of you and the team.
• Written and verbal communication skills. You can communicate effectively and efficiently taking into account the nature of your audience.
• An analytical mind set and the ability to tackle specific business problems.
• Experience and proven success driving the adoption of inner sourcing initiatives.
• A strong understanding of building secure, robust and maintainable software solutions.
• Knowledge of Enterprise integration patterns, microservice architectures and event sourcing.
• Strong experience of automation, configuration management, multi-cloud and hybridisation, IAAS and PAAS.
• Experience working with open-source Data-Science environments e.g. Spark, Tensorflow, Pandas.
• Experience building solutions that run in the cloud, ideally Azure.
• Experience with big data technologies such as Spark and data pipelines.
• Awareness of emerging MLOps practices and tooling would be an advantage e.g. model lifecycle management.
• Experience with different programming languages and a good grasp of at least one language.  The ideal candidate is fluent in Python.
• Commercial experience contributing to the success of high impact Data Science projects within complex organisations.

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.