Software Development Manager - Identity

At Tesco, we believe in the power of spending more time together, face to face, than apart. So, during your working week, you can expect to spend 60% of your time in one of our office locations or local sites and the rest remotely. We also recognise that life looks a little different for each of us. Some people are at the start of their careers, some want the freedom to do the things they love. Others are going through life-changing moments like becoming a carer, nearing retirement, adapting to parenthood, or something else. That’s why at Tesco, we always welcome a conversation about flexible working. So, talk to us throughout your application about how we can support.

The 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!

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, operationally robust, 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.

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We’re all about the little helps. That’s why we make sure our Tesco colleague benefits package takes care of you – both in and out of work. Click Here to find out more!

• Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus Bank holidays)
• Private medical insurance
• 26 weeks maternity and adoption leave (after 1 years’ service) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, we also offer 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave
• Free 24/7 virtual GP service, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for you and your family, free access to a range of experts to support your mental wellbeing

Our vision at Tesco is to become every customer's favourite way to shop, whether they are at home or out on the move. Our core purpose is ‘Serving our customers, communities and planet a little better every day’. Serving means more than a transactional relationship with our customers. It means acting as a responsible and sustainable business for all stakeholders, for the communities we are part of and for the planet.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) at Tesco means that whoever you are and whatever your background, we always want you to feel represented and that you can be yourself at work. In short, we’re a place where Everyone’s Welcome. We’re proud to have been accredited Disability Confident Leader and we’re committed to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process. For further information on the accessibility support we can offer, please click here.

We’re a big business and we can offer a range of diverse full-time & part-time working patterns across our many business areas, which means that we can find something that works for you.  We work in a more blended pattern -combining office and remote working.  Our offices will continue to be where we connect, collaborate and innovate.