Principal Engineer (John Lewis Shop & Contact Centre) in South West London

At a glance

• Contract type – This position is a permanent contract.

• Salary – £75,000 – £120,000

• Flexible Working: This is a hybrid working role, therefore your time will primarily be split between working from home (in the UK) and London Head Office. However, there will also be an expectation to visit other locations as the need arises.

• While most engineers visit the office once or twice a month, occasionally business needs may require more frequent attendance. Our offices are open five days a week for those who prefer to work from the office more regularly.

Key Responsibilities:

• As a Principal Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in aligning the engineering strategy and roadmap for John Lewis shops and contact centres with the overarching business objectives. Your influence will extend to key decisions that shape the operation of shop and contact centre systems and guide how engineering drives change across this complex business area. This will involve influencing how work is managedwhether agile, waterfall, or hybrid including the effectiveness and measurement of teams. This includes ensuring that engineering practices align with the broader Partnership engineering strategy and influencing team structure, balance, and resource models by providing key input on ways of working and team maturity to deliver optimal engineering capabilities

• A key objective of the role is to help lead the modernisation and maintainability of technology for this part of the business, including opportunities to solve business and customer problems through innovative technologies. Foundational to this will be helping to establish Product ways of working.

• To do this you will collaborate closely with key stakeholders such as Product Leads, Delivery and Operations Managers, Infrastructure Leads and Enterprise Architects as well as Senior Staff Engineers and specialist engineering teams. You will also work closely with other Principal Engineers who may be responsible for other business areas or for deep engineering specialisms such as cloud or data.

• Successful candidates will have a passion for using technology to deliver outstanding and innovative software solutions, and will have a track record of working with teams delivering complex, performant, high quality software.

Essential skills/experience youll need:

• Strong engineering background with real world experience of modern software engineering techniques such as Continuous Delivery and ideally experience of using strategic patterns of Domain Driven Design.

• Experience of the technical implementation of package solutions into complex environments.

• Experience in senior leadership role, leading across multiple teams, working with senior stakeholders and influencing multi-million pound investments in engineering

• Knowledge/experience of working with different architectural styles (e.g. monolith, service based, microservices) and integration patterns when working with different platforms (broker models, RESTful, streams, event based).

• Knowledge/experience of techniques used to increase resilience and/or scalability of systems.

• Experience of applying techniques from Lean and Systems Thinking.

Desirable skills/experience you may have

• Retail or Contact Centre experience

• Working with legacy systems

• Will have been a hands-on software engineer for part of their career.

• Engineering management role, working across multiple teams or architecture role working across a large part of an enterprise.

Next Steps

• The application form consists of a CV upload followed by application questions. Please ensure you refresh the page each time you complete a task to ensure you complete everything that you need to do before the closing date.

• If you are successful following your initial application, the next stages are: a screening interview followed by a formal interview and up to 2 informal interviews.

• You\’ll be asked about any adjustments you might need to support the recruitment process. Let us know, and we\’ll be sure to discuss it with you.