Overview
In this Staff Test Engineer role, you will shape quality engineering across a large-scale retail technology ecosystem. You’ll partner with engineering leaders to set strategy, drive standards, and mentor teams to deliver reliable, testable software. You’ll design reusable testing capabilities, embed quality in CI/CD, and explore AI-enabled approaches to improve delivery. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on cross-team impact and long-term maintainability in a fast-moving environment.
Pay / Benefits
- Flexible working arrangements
- Colleague discount across brands
- Health cover
- Pension plan
- Bonus scheme
- Life insurance and private healthcare
Responsibilities
- Set strategic quality engineering goals with senior leaders and evaluate technical options
- Mentor and coach engineers to raise team performance and technical judgment
- Collaborate across the organisation to reuse technology and share expertise
- Define the technical direction for quality platforms, tooling, and shared services
- Design and evolve reusable testing capabilities improving testability and automation
- Develop working software assets (services, libraries, integrations, tools)
- Embed automated quality controls and performance benchmarks in CI/CD pipelines
- Guide teams across component, integration, contract, end-to-end and non-functional testing
- Promote reliability, resilience, observability, accessibility and production readiness
- Identify and apply AI/agent-based approaches across the SDLC
- Lead complex technical investigations and drive improvements
- Create reusable patterns to reduce duplication and harmonise engineering practices
- Connect quality engineering with wider technology strategy alongside other Staff/Principal Engineers
- Coach engineers to strengthen technical ownership of quality
- Stay current with quality engineering advances and translate into practical improvements
Key requirements
- Strong programming skills in Java, JavaScript, TypeScript or another modern language
- Evidence of building a platform, service, tool or similar software product
- Strong knowledge of software architecture, APIs, distributed systems and cloud engineering
- Experience designing, building and supporting CI/CD pipelines and modern software delivery practices
- Knowledge of quality engineering across functional and non-functional testing
- Experience designing or improving automation frameworks and test architecture
- Experience applying quality engineering practices across performance, accessibility, observability and production readiness
- Knowledge of AI and agent-based capabilities in the SDLC with focus on quality and testing
- Ability to experiment with emerging technologies and turn ideas into working capabilities
- Judgement to balance delivery speed, quality and maintainability
- Strong listening and interpersonal skills
- Initiative and risk assessment
- Mentoring and coaching abilities
- Java, JavaScript, TypeScript or other modern language
- Platform/service/tool development
- Software architecture, APIs, distributed systems
Staff Engineer - Test - Quality Engineering in London employer: Sainsbury's Bank
As a Programme Manager at our company, you'll be part of a dynamic and inclusive team dedicated to driving large-scale transformation initiatives within the logistics sector. We pride ourselves on fostering a supportive work culture that prioritises employee development, offers flexible working arrangements, and provides an extensive range of benefits including generous discounts, performance-related bonuses, and comprehensive healthcare options. Join us to not only advance your career but also contribute to meaningful projects that impact millions of customers every day.
