Principal Software Engineer - Price Service

Price Service is a HTTP API handling pricing and promotions across all of Tesco’s channels and is of central importance to Tesco’s strategic plans to better serve 28 million shoppers each week in the UK, and more around the globe. The impact of the team’s work is visible through Tesco's tills, websites and mobile apps - it is rare to find a job with this level of challenge and impact. The API is being built for consumption on the open internet to enable future innovation in the wider world, so the team has to tackle hard distributed systems problems at scale to ensure high availability and performance. CAP theorem is a regular and very practical topic of conversation within the team!

The service is built with Java, Vert.x, RxJava, Groovy, Couchbase and Kafka, among other technologies. It runs on AWS & Azure with fully automated testing in a continuous deployment pipeline. The team works according to Agile principles, adapting Kanban and other techniques as appropriate to succeed.

The team is humble , supportive of each other and highly collaborative both internally and with other teams, with pairing a common occurrence and all code is reviewed via Github.

Principal Software Development Engineer are the creative minds developing the software applications that make life easier for customers. They lead the entire development and support process for a software program with an API-first and DevOps attitude. They produce high quality working software that adds value to our customers, their applications improving the simplicity of tasks with the impact ranging from saving time, effort or money to re-defining normal.

In this role, you will:

• Apply your in-depth knowledge of multiple programming languages, associated frameworks, and the tool ecosystem to create elegant solutions to problems.
• Adopt new languages and new paradigms and produce proof of concepts to evaluate new tools, applying them to the problem domain where they deliver significant benefit.
• Lead group discussions on design and model multiple domains, articulating contexts and boundaries and the rationale behind them, shaping the wider application landscape.
• Work with product teams to understand and translate their needs into improvements in your product, translating requirements into tasks and code and developing high-quality code that can lead to rapid delivery.
• Support production systems, resolving incidents, and performing root cause analysis.
• Share knowledge with the wider engineering community, mentoring and developing those around you to raise the bar of the organisation.

Experience relevant for this job:

• Previous experience of working in and across engineering teams in a similar role.
• Hands-on experience in the development of RESTful APIs and distributed systems that work at scale.
• Experience of designing and building distributed systems for scalability, availability and performance.
• Experience of testing and automating everything.

Skills relevant for the job:

• A polyglot set of languages, frameworks and technologies on which you can draw from your background of commercial experience with.
• 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 crafting systems and reasoning about them. When solving problems, you take a detailed and logical approach to solving them and you retain ownership through to resolution.
• Customer focus; you can find the right balance between outcome delivery and technical excellence and place the needs of our customers above those of you and the team.
• Written and verbal communication skills.

We offer excellent benefits that help make Tesco a great place to work.  These include but aren’t limited to:

• Annual bonus scheme of up to 45% of base salary
• Car allowance of £7,320 per annum
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus 8 Bank holidays)
• On-site state of the art gym at our Welwyn Campus with discounted “Gympass” membership & free health checks via Nuffield Health
• Retirement savings plan - save between 6% and 10% and Tesco will match your contribution
• Life Assurance - 5 x contractual pay
• Share Schemes – Join our ‘Buy As You Earn’ & ‘Save As You Earn’ share schemes after 3 months service
• Colleague Clubcard (including a 2nd card for a family member) after 3 months service
• Colleague Discounts:

• • 10% increasing to 15% after every pay day for a four day period, off most purchases at Tesco
  • 10% off One Stop
  • 10% off pay monthly & SIM only deals with Tesco Mobile
  • 20% off all F&F purchases
  • 20% off car, pet and home insurance at Tesco bank. T&C’s apply
  • 25% off Tesco Café
  • 50% off complete glasses purchases & free eye tests (other offers available) at Vision Express
  • 50% off health checks at Tesco Pharmacy

• An exclusive deals and discounts website saving you money on everyday purchases, treats for the family, eating out and utility bills for the home
• Health screening every 2 years
• Private medical insurance offered by Bupa
• Cycle to work scheme
• Shuttle Bus Service to/from Hatfield & Welwyn Garden City Station to Welwyn Campus & Hatfield Offices
• Opportunities to get on - take advantage of our ongoing learning opportunities and award-winning training, to help you achieve the job and career you want
• Our Employee Assistance Programme helps you deal with life’s challenges
• Financial wellness - Tesco has partnered with experts to help you make the most of your money
• Get involved in a range of fundraising activities with our long-term charity partners.

Our vision here at Tesco is to become every customer's 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 are proud to have an inclusive culture at Tesco where everyone is welcome and truly feels able to be themselves. At Tesco, we not only celebrate diversity but recognise the value and opportunity it brings to enable us to serve our shoppers a little better every day. We strive to create a workforce that reflects our customers not only here in the UK, but worldwide. Our aim is to attract and welcome a diverse range of applicants from all walks of life, offering many varying working patterns across our business, and we would love to hear from you!