Staff Software Engineer - Java - Supply Chain

Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits

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

Contract type: Permanent

Business area: Sainsbury's Tech

Closing date: 19 December 2025

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.

Do all this and more:

• Work alongside multiple teams on projects and efforts that have strategic value to the company.
• Embrace the challenges through driving tech design, up-levelling the teams, keeping tech standards high and building relations between the domains to ensure optimal technical decision making across the wider ecosystem of Sainsbury’s tech.
• Enjoy being a hands-on developer choosing where your skills make the most difference.

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 tech we use is bang up to date (state of the art), whether we’re in the cloud deploying over a 1,000 microservices into AWS, Azure & 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. Throughout, you’ll be working with engineers and 3rd parties to deliver high quality and well-designed solutions.

What you’ll be doing:

• Working across the Supply Chain space you’ll partner with the Head of Engineering to help set and achieve strategic goals and objectives; help evaluate and drive technical decisions and plan teams development and support.
• Work with engineers at all levels, promoting technical standards, sharing your expertise, helping them to find the best solutions while also giving them coaching and mentoring to set the teams for success and help them perform at their best.
• You will have flexibility to use your judgement and feedback to pick the challenges where your contribution is needed the most.
• Work with your peers from other areas to widen your knowledge, deliver broader solutions and ensure reusability of the tech and skills across different domains and also support each other.
• Act as a technical backbone, a point of contact and a coach and a guide.

We have plans to expand our engineering entry programs and we want you to be a big part of that too, ensuring that we recruit the best talent and constantly raise the bar.

Who you are:

• You’re an experienced and passionate engineer, with both technical depth and breadth.
• You can take the initiative, evaluate risks and drive continuous improvement to get the best outcomes.
• You trust your judgement and analysis to contribute to complex decision making.
• You’ll need the ability to become part of your teams and support them by leading from experience in what they’re doing.
• You should be strong in both technical and Agile mentorship, guiding on the engineering vision as well as helping them to increase their performance.
• Whether you specialise in software, data, infrastructure, or network, you’ll bring us programming language expertise and experience of software design and implementation.
• Listening and interpersonal skills will be vital to build relations and influence.
• Your ability to adapt and embrace the challenge will be a good help in your journey through discovering the diversity of our tech and setting a path to big ambitions and bold changes.

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:

• 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.
• 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. Here are some of them:

• 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.
• 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, depending on how we perform.
• Your wellbeing is important to us too. You’ll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday.
• 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, pay 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, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.
• 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.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).