Engineering Manager - Java
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: London Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1M 6HA
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Sainsbury's Tech
Closing date: 23 July 2025
Requisition ID: 299710
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you’ll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We’ve made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.
About the team
The Sales Transaction Service (STS) team is the single source of truth for sales & returns data across all Sainsbury’s brands and channels. It is responsible for publishing data with low latency, high quality, and continuous uptime.
STS is a critical service used by all areas of the business – from Finance, to Nectar, to Supply Chain, to AI & ML – and is key to delivering many of our Next Level priorities.
What you'll do
- Lead a team of software engineers, ensuring they have everything they need to deliver at pace and with consistently high quality.
- Mentor and coach your team members, recruiting diverse and talented individuals, and promoting a culture of collaboration, learning, and respect.
- Define STS’ technical direction in close partnership with Product, Architecture, and the wider technology organisation.
- Co-define and prioritise the work to be done, ensuring a balanced backlog of business initiatives with engineering initiatives.
- Manage multiple deliveries in parallel, ensuring it is completed on-time with good governance practices.
- Manage service & change management to a high standard, offering robust SLAs to your data consumers.
- Promote best engineering practises and embed agile / lean delivery methodologies.
- Manage technology partners and ensuring high quality of their delivery.
- Own a £1m+ budget, ensuring accurate financial forecasting every period.
- Ensure your team’s ongoing adherence to Sainsbury’s processes and standards.
- Take part in a 24x7 on-call support rota.
Who you are
- You are an engineering leader with experience running high-performing teams.
- You have a track record of running Tier 1 critical Kafka services to strict SLAs.
- You have deep technical expertise in Java, Kafka, Spring, and Kafka Streams.
- You have led multiple complex deliveries, making collaborative & well-informed technical decisions to achieve business objectives.
- You build strong relationships at all levels and contribute to the inclusive and diverse culture that Sainsbury's Tech values.
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.
Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
