Principal Software Development Engineer

As a Principal Software Development Engineer; you are key in shaping large parts of Tesco s technical landscape. You contribute to strategic planning; combining business vision and industry best practices to define technical strategy and make decisions. You typically work across multiple teams; setting the standard for engineering excellence and efficient technical design. You are hands-on and guide teams to improve technology across product portfolios; infrastructure and processes.

In This Job I

Guide Large Programmes of Work - Show perseverance and patience in driving large; complex or difficult initiatives from inception to completion; working with and influencing the engineering; product; program and business teams in Tesco
- Convert ambiguous and complex business problems into simple technical solutions.
- Influence build vs buy decisions; deprecate creaking software/applications; lead significant refactoring. I make the right trade-offs to influence the roadmap and sequencing of work to deliver early and often.
- Get hands on with design and coding to resolve hard problems that have a long-term impact on a product or technology implementation.

Drive one or more areas
- Guide one or more areas and define the strategic design keeping security; scalability; extensibility and reusability in mind
- Contribute to Tesco s Inner Source Platform; acting as maintainer or contributor to one or more projects; whilst influencing direction and driving adoption.
- Have great communication and influencing skills to resolve disputes and to lead stakeholders to appropriate decisions with data points and foresight.
- Have sufficient breadth and depth of technical knowledge to influence senior leaders on engineering strategy
- Write critical path code; having a good appreciation of the whole stack and SDLC using continuous deployment pipelines; cloud infrastructure automation; monitoring and alerting with an agile DevOps mind-set.
- Create strategy documents; designs and code which are exemplary and serve as a role model to fellow PSDEs and SDEs.
- Innovate and keep abreast of industry trends and competition; grasping new paradigms and languages quickly
- Routinely come up with PoCs to evaluate approaches or technology choices to enable or accelerate programmes.
Guide & Mentor SDEs
- Guide SDEs in one or more functional areas; under one or more HoSDs/Directors or under a distinct functional area such as Azure; Eventing; Store applications or Data engineering.
- Set up knowledge transfer sessions on specific areas or practices
- Lead constructive code and design reviews; probing assumptions; highlighting risks and leaving behind better quality repositories.
- Contribute to the development of SDEs; ensuring that they reach their full potential

Help with Organization Goals
- Help with hiring both engineering ICs and Managers
- Calibrate assessors and strengthen the assessment process for Tesco
- Raise the bar for coding and design to ensure it is high and keeps going up as best practice and expectations evolve

Experienced PSDE having good skills in backend Java and related tech stack; eventing technologies; Databases (nosql; sql; in memory); DeOps; agile practices; security and mentoring SDE3s.