Principal Software Engineer

Why join us

Joining Sainsbury's Tech means becoming part of an organisation that powers the UK's leading multi-channel, multi-brand retailer. As a Principal Engineer in the Digital&Payments area, you will play a pivotal role in driving innovation and engineering excellence within our dynamic and inclusive environment. You'll have the opportunity to work alongside talented teams building software, enabling engineers to succeed and shaping the direction of technology standards and best practises.

With the freedom to explore, experiment, and lead the way in helping create high performing teams, you'll contribute to building and delivering scalable solutions that impact millions of customers. We offer growth opportunities, a supportive community of practise, and a collaborative culture that values evidence-based decision-making and ownership of outcomes. Join our team and be at the forefront of shaping the future of retail technology while enjoying a work-life balance that allows you to thrive both personally and professionally.

What you'll do

As a principal software engineer you stand at the core of technological innovation, blending deep technical expertise with visionary technical leadership for software engineering. In our fast-evolving digital and payments environment, this role demands mastery across highly scalable systems, and the latest in secure, customer-facing technologies both front and back-end development. Yet technical acumen is just the beginning. The principal engineer inspires and elevates teams through influence—leading by example, fostering collaboration, and championing bold new approaches without relying on formal authority.

Fearless in the face of complexity, you are entrusted to steer teams through critical technology decisions, courageously questioning assumptions and challenging the status quo. The principal is relentless in ensuring that every solution not only pushes boundaries but also aligns with our technical standards and industry best practices, safeguarding quality at every step and understanding value released.

Equally, this leader is a catalyst for continuous improvement, always scanning the horizon for emerging trends. By actively promoting the use of AI and ensuring we have the right analytics, they enable teams to unlock new efficiencies and deliver truly transformative retail experiences. Their guidance ensures our teams do not just keep pace with change but help define the future of digital retail across the Sainsburys&Argos brands.

What you'll need in order to suceed

• A proven ability to think strategically and creatively across multiple teams at extreme scale, and to turn ideas into impactful solutions.
• Commitment to writing clean, maintainable code and sharing best practices in design patterns.
• Experience with AI tooling, understanding how teams can approach the challenge of bringing it into the development process. Being able to explain the 'why' and 'how' it can be used.
• Skilled at facilitating system design conversations, welcoming input from all team members and valuing diverse perspectives.
• Ability to analyse and optimise processes, leading teams to deliver meaningful development and service improvements.
• Experience with a range of prototyping methods, and a passion for mentoring others and sharing methodologies.
• Strong understanding of quality assurance and testing frameworks, and how to apply them in practice.
• Ability to guide staff&senior engineers and technical stakeholders towards shared outcomes, fostering collaboration rather than prescribing solutions.
• Expertise in cloud computing, automation, and reliability engineering, with a willingness to share knowledge and support others' growth.
• Experience across monitoring and alerting using technologies such as New Relic, and a commitment to performance engineering.
• Values inclusion actively seeking out different viewpoints and creates an environment where everyone can contribute and thrive.
• We use a variety of technologies across Digital and Payments ReactJS, , Java, Springboot, Kotlin, Kafka as examples. You should have strong ability across both front and backend technologies, and capable of learning and leading new languages and technologies.

In return you'll get:

• Colleague discount across the multi-brands - Sainsbury's, Argos and Habitat
• Holiday allowance
• Competitive Bonus scheme
• Car allowance
• Pension plan
• Hybrid working model
• Special offers on gym memberships, restaurants, holidays, retail vouchers and more