Senior Backend Software Engineer (Java/Python)

What’s in it for you

We offer excellent benefits that help make Tesco a great place to work!  These include but are not limited to:

• Annual bonus scheme
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (and bank holidays)
• Great colleague discounts and deals, saving you money on everyday purchases, utility bills for the home and more
• Retirement savings plan – save between 4% and 7.5% and Tesco will match your contribution
• Buy as you earn and Save as you earn share schemes
• Opportunities to get on – take advantage of our ongoing learning opportunities and award-winning training to help you achieve the career you want

About the role

We’re a new team operating with startup urgency to create new customer growth. Expect end‑to‑end ownership—rapid experimentation, fast shipping, and leaning in wherever the work takes you, beyond your job title. If you’re ambitious, hard‑working, and excited to build 0→1 against tall ambitions, you’ll thrive here.

As our SDEIII you’ll drive fast, high-quality delivery today while architecting the path to scale tomorrow — integrating deeply with Tesco systems, partnering externally, and unblocking with creativity and pace to realise the team vision.

You will be responsible for

As a Software Development Engineer III you are in a senior Individual Contributor engineering role at Tesco. Your proficiency with foundational computer science and software engineering concepts is taken as a given, and you will have proven significant technical depth and breadth. At this level you will be playing an active role in technical leadership, with proven impact across teams and the wider directorate. You take ownership and accountability of the development of the products in your domain. 

- Ship high profile customer-facing backend services regularly; own design, build and release end-to-end

- Rapidly prototype and iterate on future capabilities to de-risk and inform the roadmap. 

- Maximise re-use of Tesco’s existing platforms and services; integrate, extend and collaborate with API teams 

- Partner with Enterprise Architecture to iterate towards a scalable, secure, composable software architecture

- Move at pace: proactively unblock delivery, simplify complex problems, and maintain quality through automated testing and observability.

- Establish repeatable CI/CD, test‑data, and environment practices to ship reliably at pace.

- Work daily with front end and data science engineers to ship end-to-end customer outcomes; full‑stack experience (or a strong appetite to learn fast) is a big plus.

- Desirable tech areas of interest: orchestration services / BFFs, AI Agents / LLMs, responsive performance optimisation.

Mindset we hire for - 

- Bias to action: you move from idea to test to live quickly, and learn in the wild.

- Scrappy and resourceful: you ship with the tools to hand; progress over perfection

- Experimentation machine: hypothesis → smallest test → data → iteration is your default.

- Customer‑obsessed: you validate with customers and let insight drive decisions.

- Ownership: you take responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks.

- Transparent communicator: you keep the team and stakeholders in the loop, early and often.

- Resilient learner: you understand the value of failing, and bounce back quickly

- Corporate-savvy builder: you can deliver iterative value within a large organisation.

- AI‑forward: you use AI to accelerate research, synthesis, and delivery.

You will need

• Java
• Python
• Spring Boot
• Kafka
• Redis
• GraphQL
• Couchbase