Head of Engineering

Sainsbury's; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Colleague discount

Pensions

Life cover

Performance bonus

Annual leave

Season ticket loan

Cycle to work

Private healthcare

Car allowance

Employee assistance

Maternity leave

Paternity leave

Job summary

Sainsbury's is seeking a Head of Engineering for ML & AI in London to scale platforms, lead senior engineering teams, and partner with data science and product stakeholders. You will drive architectural decisions, establish best practices, and ensure reliable, secure AI solutions that impact millions of customers.

You will champion agile ways of working, mentor leaders, manage budgets, and align technical delivery with business priorities while sustaining high-velocity, resilient engineering

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software/data engineering.
• 4+ years in senior engineering leadership.
• Proven experience building and scaling ML platforms.
• Hands-on depth in distributed data systems.
• Working knowledge of modern AI infrastructure (LLM gateways, RAG pipelines).
• Track record of setting technical strategy across teams.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and MLOps tooling.
• Experience operating AI gateways in production.

Responsibilities

• Builds relationships with business and tech leaders to champion technology and agile ways of working.
• Collaborates with Data Scientists to create reusable ML capabilities on the platform.
• Leads teams to deliver differentiating ML products and services.
• Owns deployment pipelines and governance for production changes.
• Mentors engineers, promoting technical excellence and high performance.
• Delivers value fast with aligned product priorities and outcomes.

Skills

Leadership

ML platforms

AI infrastructure

Cloud infra

Stakeholder mgmt

Distributed systems

Production ML

Strategic thinking

Education

Bachelor's in CS

Master's preferred

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Airflow

MLflow

Job description

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.

Why join us

As the Head of Engineering for ML & AI, you'll be a trusted voice for technology and innovation within our business community. With over 2000 locations, and 100,000 + colleagues, you will engage and manage stakeholders, teams, and suppliers to deliver exceptional experiences for our customers and colleagues. As a trusted leader of leaders, you will foster a high-performance, inclusive culture, ensuring your teams operate in an empowered and professional environment. With a focus on people leadership, engagement, and communication, you will lead the evolution of our teams towards agile ways of working, drive delivery excellence, and champion technical excellence.

About The Team

The ML & AI family is expected to grow considerably over Beyond Next Level, spanning both the expansion of core platform capabilities and the delivery of production machine learning and AI solutions into the business. The remit encompasses ML Platforms, AI Gateways, Responsible AI controls, model lifecycle management, reusable AI services in data space and the engineering delivery of machine learning models that support strategic business outcomes including our Boulders, Big Rocks and Big Bets. As adoption accelerates, the technical complexity, operational accountability and scale of delivery will increase significantly, requiring dedicated senior engineering leadership to own architecture, engineering standards, platform reliability and delivery execution. The Head of Engineering role provides the leadership required to scale both the platforms and the engineering delivery capability in a controlled and sustainable manner, ensuring Sainsbury's can rapidly industrialise AI whilst maintaining resilience and engineering excellence.

What You’ll Do

• Building strong relationships with business and tech leaders, you will be the trusted voice for technology, innovation, and modern agile ways of working within your respective business community.
• Working with Data Scientists community to build reusable ML capabilities on the platform
• Working with wider Tech to put models on Production for large scale of users
• You’ll lead and mentor teams of engineers to deliver unique and differentiating products, fostering a culture of innovation and high technical standards.
• You will be accountable for the processes and path to production and deployment of change, ensuring that all new and enhanced products and platforms are released seamlessly and in line with business change plans.
• As a leader, you will build strong relationships, drive continuous improvement, and champion the concept of expert, stable, and integrated teams.
• Your success will be measured by the quality of relationships established, successful alignment of product priorities and outcomes, technical excellence demonstrated, and the delivery of customer value and business outcomes at pace.

Who You Are

• You're a strategic leader who knows how to build great relationships across a business.
• With your deep understanding of both the technology landscape and retail/ logistics operations, you play a pivotal role in ensuring the delivery of unique and differentiating products to millions of customers.
• Leading and mentoring teams of engineers, you champion agile ways of working, foster a culture of innovation, and continuously strive for improved outcomes and value.
• Your ability to make sound judgments, manage budgets, and make data-driven decisions allows you to drive maximum efficiency and effectiveness within your teams and deliver customer value at pace.
• With your passion for technology, and results-oriented mindset, you empower your teams to perform at their best and deliver high-quality solutions that align with the overall business strategy.
• You are a visionary leader who continuously stays relevant in the ever-changing technology landscape, and you make decisive decisions to drive success.

Essential Criteria

• 10+ years in software/data engineering, with 4+ years in senior engineering leadership
• Proven experience building and scaling ML platforms (training, serving, feature stores, experimentation/model monitoring)
• Hands-on depth in distributed data systems
• Working knowledge of modern AI infrastructure – LLM gateways, vector/semantic search, RAG pipelines, or agentic frameworks
• Track record of setting technical strategy and driving architectural decisions across multiple teams
• Strong stakeholder management – able to translate between data science, product, executive stakeholders
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and MLOps tooling
• Experience operating AI gateways or LLM orchestration layers in production

Desirable

• Background in semantic layer or knowledge graph technologies
• Exposure to regulated or high-compliance data environment

Benefits

• 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 65% of salary, depending on how we perform (in cash and shares).
• The 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, 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.
• You’ll also receive a company car cash allowance unless you are going to travel 10,000 business miles in your role, then you’ll be able to choose a car.
• 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).