Head of Software Development - Shire Park

About the Stock flow Team

The stock flow team develops the suite of applications responsible for managing the demand supply cycle in Tesco. Tesco has one of the worlds best supply chain systems in the retail sector. The current technology landscape is a mixture of open source technologies and legacy mainframe technologies. The goal is to transform the technology landscape to unlock substantially more value from the technology.

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 optimization problems at scale, to ensure that Tesco continues to be a benchmark for supply chain technologies. Transformation without sacrificing the current operation would be the key theme for this role.

The current technology stack has matured in its life cycle and there are some exciting plans for unlock a lot of business value by transforming and simplifying the current technology stack. We have started the journey of transforming these applications into micro services / event based architecture 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. 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 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:

• building 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 operational excellence ideally in mainframe environment
• A track record of transforming the legacy mainframe to open source technologies
• A track record of delivering large-scale, well architected solutions at pace
• You drive and implement best practice improvements
• You confidently and competently impart knowledge to users, customers, and other team members
• Java, Akka and other modern languages in addition to an understanding of mainframe environment
• 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