Head of Software Development - Shire Park

The Payment Service a new HTTP API that will handle all customer payment transactions for all of Tescos channels and geographies. It is of central importance to Tescos 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 teams 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.

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 thats 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

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