Job Introduction
The Payment Service a new HTTP API that will handle all customer payment transactions for all of Tesco's channels and geographies.  It 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. To do so the engineering team has to tackle hard security and distributed systems problems at scale, to ensure high availability and performance.
The impact of the Payment Service team's work will be visible through Tesco's tills, websites and mobile apps - it is rare to find a job with this level of challenge and impact. The HTTP API is being built in the Cloud, and designed to enable future innovation in the wider world. 
The service is being built with Akka, Java, Cassandra and Kafka, among other technologies. It runs in AWS and our Private Data Centres with fully automated testing in a continuous deployment pipeline.  Security is paramount and embedded in everything we do, PCI data is separated and vaulted.
The team works according to Agile principles, adapting Kanban and other techniques as appropriate to succeed. Pairing is very common and all code is reviewed via Github.
The team is humble and supportive of each other and highly collaborative both internally and with other teams. Egos should stay at home.

Main Responsibilities
The Role - Head of Software Development
 
As the Head of Software Development, you will lead the engineering activity creating the environment for sustainable development to exist and succeed.  You will lead by example, and be responsible for:

• a team that is able to cover the whole software development and operational demands of the area
• the budget and development process for the Payment Service
• driving continuous improvement of engineering practises and helping improve the efficiency of the development in Tesco

The role involves the following activities:

• Leading engineers to write high quality code that's easy to understand and work with
• Hands-on contributing to the end solution
• Balancing resource requirements to ensure the needs of the product are met by the team
• Ensuring impediments are removed and the demands on your team are clear, and commitments are met
• Building consensus to ensure the right solution is delivered
• Tracking the progress and the quality of the solutions your team delivers to ensure you provide a sustainable pace of the delivery of value
• Ensuring the right team and processes are established to continually deliver quality solutions
• Building for security and user data privacy
• Being involved with attracting and interviewing further excellent engineers for Tesco

Automate everything by default
 
 

The Ideal Candidate
Experience relevant for this job:

• A strong people manager, with excellent collaboration and stakeholder management skills
• A track record of delivering large-scale, well architected solutions at pace
• Drive and implement best practice improvements
• Confidently and competently impart knowledge to users, customers, and other team members
• Java, Akka and other modern languages
• Strong understanding of security, HSMs, and ideally within the Payment area
• Designing and building distributed systems, for scalability, availability and performance
• Testing everything, automating everything

Skills relevant for the job

• Written and verbal communication skills
• Problem solving, analysis and computational skills
• Customer focus
• Innovative approach to problem solving

 
 

About The Company
Why Tesco Technology....

• We are building systems to solve real world problems at scale, with impact for tens of millions of people
• There are great engineers (and managers and product people) to learn from
• We are agile and enlightened in our approach to building software and teams
• There's a great atmosphere and we work sustainability as a team

 

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

• An annual bonus scheme of up to 45% of base salary
• Car Allowance of £7,320 per annum
• Colleague Clubcard (including a 2nd card for a family member) after 6 months service with 10% off most purchases at Tesco.
• A retirement savings plan:  6%-10% contribution rate
• Life Assurance - 5 x contractual pay
• Buy As You Earn Scheme
• Save As You Earn Scheme
• Health Screening every 2 years
• Deals & Discounts through Tesco including Tesco Mobile & Tesco Bank
• Deals and Discounts through many other external businesses