Solutions Architect - ML Capabilities 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 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.

Location: London Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1M 6HA

Contract type: Permanent

Business area: Sainsbury's Tech

Closing date: 06 February 2026

About the team

As a Solutions Architect at Sainsbury’s, you will guide the design and delivery of our innovative Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning platform, collaborating with a multi-disciplinary engineering team to ensure robust, scalable, and effective solutions.

Responsibilities

• Play a crucial role in planning and defining the technical roadmap for your responsible capability areas.
• Architect robust, scalable, and secure ML solutions, balancing build versus buy decisions to maximise business value and ensure cost-effectiveness.
• Define and champion the technical vision and best practices for AI & ML Engineering across Sainsbury’s Tech, sharing expertise and promoting collaboration within the architecture community of practice.
• Shape and design new products and services that align with the overall architecture.
• Create cloud-native designs for complex projects, along with evolution of Sainsbury’s ML Ops platform on Microsoft Azure, supporting the entire machine learning lifecycle—from data sourcing and feature engineering through to model training, deployment, and real-time serving.
• Develop and communicate the technical architecture, roadmap, and strategy for your areas of responsibility.
• Influence teams within your domain to prioritise and build components that add the most value, while also driving the adoption of technology principles across your areas of responsibility.
• Share your expertise, contribute innovative design ideas, and promote collaboration and innovation across teams.

Success in this role requires a deep understanding of the technology landscape, staying informed about industry and retail developments, applying modern engineering techniques and cloud-native design principles, building trust and credibility, and delivering results with a focus on problem-solving and collaboration.

Qualifications

• A passionate and experienced Solutions Architect with a deep understanding of the role AI & ML plays in retail success.
• Strategic technical expert with hands-on experience in ML Engineering & DevOps, delivering and operating large-scale platforms.
• Skilled in cloud architecture (Azure or AWS a plus), data pipelines, stream processing, and real-time analytics.
• Champion of modern engineering practices, bringing cutting-edge tools and methodologies to improve team efficiency and innovation.
• Comprehensive understanding of the technology landscape and stay updated on the latest developments in architecture frameworks and modern engineering practices, particularly in the context of cloud-native design.
• Strong influencing and communication skills to collaborate with product managers and engineering teams to shape and deliver innovative solutions that align with the architectural vision.
• Ability to think holistically and consider multiple viewpoints to craft creative solutions to complex technical problems.
• Driven to continuously improve and to contribute to an inclusive and diverse culture of Sainsbury's Tech.
• Proven experience delivering at least one data/analytics (ideally ML) solution on Azure in an enterprise environment.
• Experience designing monitoring and observability for distributed systems on Azure.

Nice to have

• Experience with Azure Machine Learning or equivalent ML platforms.
• Exposure to GenAI / Azure AI / Azure OpenAI or similar LLM platforms, including safe serving and cost/latency considerations.

Benefits and additional information

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 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.
• Pensions scheme and life cover.
• Performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.
• Annual holiday allowance, with the option to buy additional holiday.
• 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).
• Access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers.
• Employee Assistance Programme and eligibility for private healthcare.
• Up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.