Software Development Manager - Identity

The hardworking engineers in our Identity build the APIs that securely identify customers across all touchpoints with Tesco around the globe: online, over the phone, and in-store with Clubcards. You’ll focus on making our experiences as streamlined for customers as possible, by exploring groundbreaking authentication factors like biometrics and using ML technologies to dynamically assess the risk of each individual customer session. Your work will be at the heart of all new propositions across the Tesco Group, like our new Clubcard Plus subscription service. All of this happens in a world where scale and resilience are critical – serving over a billion API calls every week in only a handful of milliseconds each!

The stack: Java, Kotlin, Cassandra, MySQL, Oracle, Azure, AWS, Apache Spark, and Kafka

We are responsible for the software throughout the lifecycle; we maintain a DevOps culture, employing continuous integration and delivery, supporting our code through to production and beyond, as well as being firm believers in TDD.

As a Software Development Manager, your primary responsibility is to build and maintain a passionate, engaged, and effective development team of engineers. You'll do this by taking a deep interest in the people that report to you, making sure they are happy, motivated, and challenged in what they are doing, guiding them to reach pragmatic technical solutions, and keep yourself close to the code (without becoming a blocker). You'll also take ownership when things go wrong but celebrate success collectively and, in short, act as a multiplier of your team’s effectiveness. Specifically, you will:

• Foster the careers of the engineers reporting into you by finding opportunities for growth, coaching, addressing concerns, and if necessary, implementing performance management.
• Grow the capability of Tesco Technology as a whole by becoming involved in our engineering hiring and being passionate about building successful and diverse teams.
• Work closely with Product Management to identify and minimise risk within an outcome and help prioritise and evolve a workable technical solution ready for delivery.
• Represent Identity within wider technical discussions across different business groups, constantly broadening your understanding of our technology landscape so as to increase the effectiveness of your contribution.
• Take ownership for the delivery of specific outcomes, or work across wider groups in conjunction with programme management to deliver more significant outcomes. Drive us to constantly improve quality.
• Take ownership of non-functional outcomes of Tesco Connect features, including performance, availability, reliability, and security.
• Continually look for means to evolve and improve our technology, processes, and practices.

The role will include ownership of the on-call rota to support our applications in production.

Experience relevant for this job:

• Experience with management of software engineering teams of 5+ people in size.
• Good knowledge of Java and the associated ecosystem.
• Experience of using agile methodologies.
• Hands-on experience of building and supporting reliable and operationally robust full stack and distributed Java applications/products.

Skills relevant for the job

• A high degree of emotional intelligence: you are aware of your own emotions, how you appear and can self-reflect on your actions. You can empathise with others and modify your behaviour and style accordingly.
• Problem-solving, analysis, and computational skills: you are comfortable designing systems and reasoning about them. When tackling problems, you take a detailed and logical approach to solving them and retaining ownership through to resolution.
• Customer focus: you can find the right balance between outcome delivery and technical excellence. You place the needs of our customers above the needs of you and the team.
• Written and verbal communication skills: you can communicate effectively and efficiently, taking into account the nature of your audience.
• Any previous experience of having led a globally distributed software engineering team would be a huge plus.

• An annual bonus scheme which you can achieve up to 15% of base salary
• Colleague Clubcard (including a 2nd card for a family member) after 6 months service with 10% off most purchases at Tesco
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day
• A retirement savings plan - 4%-7.5% contribution rate
• Life Assurance - 5 x contractual pay
• Buy As You Earn Scheme which allows you to buy Tesco shares and save tax after 3 months of service
• Save As You Earn Scheme which gives you the opportunity to save direct from your pay for three or five years with the option of using your savings to buy Tesco shares at a discounted price after 1 year of service
• Access to Tesco Learning and Development Academy, Safari Books https://www.safaribooksonline.com and Pluralsight Technology Learning Platform https://www.pluralsight.com
• Deals & Discounts through Tesco including Tesco Mobile & Tesco Bank
• Deals and Discounts through many other external businesses
• Cycle to work and Car Share Schemes

Our vision here at Tesco is to become every customers favourite way to shop, wherever they are and however they're shopping. We want our customers to be inspired by the solutions that we are building to help them find whatever they are looking for. Here’s how we’re doing it:

• We are building systems to solve real world problems at scale, impacting tens of millions of people
• Teams of great Engineers (and Managers and Product Managers) to learn from
• We are agile and enlightened in our approach to building software and teams
• There’s a great atmosphere and we work sustainably as a team
• Tesco has a “do the right thing” mentality
• We promote flexible working

If that sounds exciting, then we'd love to hear from you.