Engineering Manager - Azure PaaS

Retail; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Employee discounts

Pension & life cover

Performance bonus up to 20% of salary

Private healthcare

Job summary

Sainsbury's Tech is seeking an Engineering Manager for the Cloud Azure PaaS team. You will lead a multi-skilled engineering group, drive platform improvements on Azure, and ensure secure, scalable production workloads. The role emphasizes mentoring, collaboration with Product Managers, and end-to-end ownership of platform services.

You will work in a hybrid setup with offices in Manchester, Coventry, and London, and operate within a culture of inclusivity and technical excellence.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team building, operating, and improving cloud platform services on Azure.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Kubernetes

AKS

Azure

On-call & incident management

SDLC & Agile

Stakeholder management

Tools

Kubernetes

AKS

Microsoft Azure

Job description

Why join us

Joining Sainsbury's Tech means becoming part of an inclusive and driven team that is passionate about creating innovative solutions. As an Engineering Manager, you will play a pivotal role in leading and coaching talented engineering teams, driving the delivery of impactful solutions that drive efficiency and enhance performance across the business. With a focus on continuous improvement, you will have the opportunity to shape a world-class engineering function and contribute to the development of cutting-edge processes and technologies. At Sainsbury's, we value collaboration, diversity, and inclusivity, and offer a supportive and inspiring environment where you can make a purposeful contribution. Join us to be a part of an organisation that fosters technical excellence and embraces the power of diversity to shape the technology landscape of a leading UK retailer.

About the team

The Cloud Azure PaaS team within Sainsbury’s Tech owns and operates a dynamic Kubernetes based Platform-as-a-Service for containerised workloads running in our Microsoft Azure estate. This platform provides teams with a golden path to production, ensuring internal customer teams’ apps and services are secure, scalable, supported and maintained.

Location: Hybrid working - SSC offices in Manchester, Coventry, or London and home.

What you'll do

• As Engineering Manager for Cloud Azure PaaS, you will lead the team responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving the platform services that enable teams across Sainsbury’s Tech to deploy and run workloads safely, reliably, and efficiently in Microsoft Azure.


• You will lead and enable the delivery of cloud platform capabilities that create business value, improve engineering efficiency, and increase the reliability and performance of services running on Azure.


• You will line manage and guide a multi-skilled engineering team, ensuring they have the necessary resources and skills to deliver end-to-end technical solutions for products.


• Your responsibilities include mentoring and coaching your team members, recruiting diverse and talented individuals, and promoting a culture of collaboration, learning, and respect.


• You will also be accountable for the reliability, operability, security posture, and continuous improvement of the platform, ensuring that teams using the platform have a clear, supported, and well-governed route to production.


• You will work closely with Product Managers and Engineers to define the vision and technical direction of the products, as well as manage multiple deliveries and take end-to-end ownership of your products, including change management and service management.


• Driving the development of new features, promoting best engineering practises, and advocating for agile / lean delivery methodologies are also essential aspects of your role.


• Additionally, you will manage initiative-level budgets, ensure adherence to processes and standards, and demonstrate positive attitudes and behaviours that contribute to a culture of excellence and inclusivity.

Who you are

• You are a passionate and experienced engineering leader with a deep understanding of engineering practises and a talent for coaching and developing teams.


• With a strong understanding of technology environments, you lead by example and inspire your colleagues, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.


• Your technical expertise combined with your ability to prioritise and manage multiple deliveries, enables you to drive the successful development and delivery of large-scale platforms.


• You excel in making well-informed technical decisions and implementing best practises, while also managing Capex and Opex responsibilities.


• With your strong leadership and communication skills, you build strong relationships at all levels and contribute to the inclusive and diverse culture that Sainsbury's Tech values.

Essential Criteria

• Proven experience line managing, hiring and developing engineers.


• Prior experience leading a Platform-as-a-Service or platform engineering team.


• Strong knowledge and experience of Kubernetes, preferably AKS.


• Strong knowledge and experience of Microsoft Azure and its constituent services.


• Experience running 24/7 production services, including on-call, incident management and disaster recovery.


• Experience applying and evolving engineering standards, SDLC and agile ways of working within a team.


• Strong stakeholder management, including with internal customer teams.

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury's. Think about the scale it takes to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety involved. Then you’ll realise this is a modern software engineering environment, because it has to be. We’ve made significant investment in the standards and principles that shape how we work. We iterate, learn, experiment and champion ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to exciting opportunities across everything from AI to reusable tech.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).