Staff Engineer - Data in London

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 to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety involved. Then you’ll realise this is a modern software engineering environment, because it has to be. We’ve made significant investment in the standards and principles that shape how we work. We iterate, learn, experiment and champion ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to exciting opportunities across everything from AI to reusable tech.

We’re a 150+ year-old business that operates on an incredible scale. There’s data from our 10 million+ Nectar users, days like Black Friday that make Argos the 3rd biggest website in the UK, and supply chain integration that gets the right products to the right locations on time, every time. The technology we use is modern, scalable and constantly evolving, whether we’re in the cloud deploying over 1,000 microservices into AWS, Azure and GCP, or streaming billions of messages on Kafka and building event‑based solutions. This is where you can broaden your technical knowledge and help solve complex problems while using your Agile skills to develop our long‑lived teams.

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll help us bring together those complex horizontal outcomes that go beyond a single team and area, working with engineers and 3rd parties to deliver high quality and well‑designed solutions.

What you’ll be doing

• Work with the Head of Engineering and Engineering Managers to shape technical priorities and reduce ambiguity, acting as a technical backbone to ensure balanced decisions across architecture, delivery, service and cost.
• Lead design reviews for complex data solutions, ensuring decisions are secure, scalable, cost‑conscious, observable and aligned to platform standards.
• Create and evolve reusable engineering patterns for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, data quality, reconciliation, testing, monitoring, alerting and access control.
• Coach engineers and senior engineers through pairing, design critique, code review, incident learning, technical storytelling and pragmatic problem solving.
• Act as a bridge between engineering, product, architecture, data governance, security, BI Hub, Data & Analytics, and strategic partners so that outcomes are technically coherent and commercially sensible.
• Support the Definition of Ready process by helping teams clarify technical feasibility, dependencies, risks, data requirements, non‑functional requirements and route‑to‑build evidence before quarterly planning commitments are made.
• Stay close to delivery where your expertise makes the biggest difference: critical migrations, platform adoption, data quality improvements, incident prevention, supplier/service issues or strategically important customer data capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement end‑to‑end data solutions that align with business objectives while adhering to best practices in data management and database performance.
• Define and communicate technical direction across multiple squads. Challenge local decisions where they create unnecessary complexity, risk, duplicated capability or long‑term support burden.
• Raise the quality bar for data products through clear ownership, robust testing, reconciliation, observability, lineage, documentation, performance and supportability.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams to address security, GDPR, PII handling, role‑based access, auditability and data governance are designed in from the start, not added later.
• Champion Sainsbury’s engineering standards, aligned autonomy and community practice; turn standards into practical patterns teams can adopt, improving resilience through monitoring, alerting, support runbooks, incident learning, data quality checks, cost controls and proactive simplification.

More about you

• Strong practical experience designing and operating modern data platforms, pipelines and services across batch, streaming and event‑driven patterns.
• Deep understanding of engineering practice: clean design, testing strategy, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, performance, security, incident response and DevSecOps.
• Experience with cloud data services and modern data stacks. Relevant technologies may include Snowflake, Azure/AWS/GCP data services, Kafka, orchestration tooling, SQL, Python, dbt or equivalent transformation frameworks.
• Strong knowledge of data modelling, data quality, metadata/catalogue, reconciliation, lineage, role‑based access, privacy, GDPR/PII handling and data governance controls.
• Ability to reason about trade‑offs across cost, performance, resilience, supportability, delivery risk and strategic fit.
• Awareness of retail and customer data trends, including personalisation, customer identity, data products, BI modernisation, AI‑enabled insight and responsible data use.
• You can influence without authority and bring people with you, even when priorities differ across squads, products, architecture and partners.
• You make technical decisions easier for others by framing the options, evidence, risks and recommended path in plain English.
• You raise standards without becoming a blocker; you know when to insist on the right pattern and when to make a pragmatic trade‑off safely.
• You care about delivery and service, not just design. You follow through from idea to production, support, measurement and continuous improvement.
• You coach with care and directness, helping engineers build confidence and judgement rather than simply giving them answers.
• You are curious about the wider technology landscape and can connect external engineering trends to Sainsbury’s scale and customer context.

What you could do in future

There’s a lot of scope for widening your skills in this role, because it allows you to move into different areas, cover lots of ground and really broaden your understanding of how the business works. When you want to take the next step up, a Principal Engineer role would help you build on everything that you’ve already learned and achieved. Your technical understanding will still be in play, but it’ll be as much about looking upwards and outwards — thinking about strategy and where we should be going and solving problems right across the technical organisation.

In return

You’ll enjoy all this and more:

• Flexible working – tailored approach to balance your working from home and collaboration in the office, sensible freedom to shape your week and day working hours, offices in different locations.
• Colleague discount across our brands – Sainsbury’s, Argos and Habitat.
• Health cover.
• Holiday allowance.
• Bonus scheme.
• Pension plan.
• Special offers on gym memberships, restaurants, holidays, retail vouchers and more.

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.

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. 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 (which may vary for Nectar360), depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. 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, salary 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.

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.