Head of Software Development - DevEx & Agentic AI

Tesco; Welwyn Garden City; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Tesco is seeking a senior leader to shape how software is built across our engineering ecosystem. Reporting to the Director of Engineering Effectiveness and Capability, you will lead teams focused on developer experience, tooling and the evolution of our SDLC in the agentic AI space.

You’ll drive strategy and execution with a mix of hands-on engineering empathy and executive perspective. You will manage globally distributed teams, govern vendor relationships, and own budgets and capability

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading geographically dispersed teams.
• Ability to shape strategic direction in a fast-evolving space.
• Strong communication and influencing skills.
• Experience managing budgets and vendor relationships.

Responsibilities

• Budget ownership and vendor evaluation.
• Oversee developer tooling and SDLC evolution.
• Lead agentic AI enablement for development teams.
• Provide thought leadership across the Technology organisation.

Skills

Agentic coding tools

Team leadership

Strategic planning

Vendor management

Job description

This is a unique opportunity to play a leading role in how software products are built within a leading global retailer with real impact across millions of customers and thousands of software engineers.
Reporting to the Director of Engineering Effectiveness and Capability, you will lead teams that focus on overall developer experience, developer tooling and will lead our efforts to evolve how software engineering is done in the world of agentic AI. You’ll play a key role in shaping strategy as well as driving execution. You’ll provide thought leadership through keeping your knowledge and expertise in agentic coding up to date through continual evaluation of new technologies and practices and be able to balance pace of delivery with the need to be secure, resilient and prudent. The impact of your work will be felt by over 2,500 software engineers.
You’ll manage and provide leadership to teams based in India and Hungary.

• Budget ownership, partnership and commercial relationships with existing suppliers in the developer tooling and agentic coding space. Continual evaluation of new tools and build vs buy decisions.
• The ongoing evolution and operational excellence of our key developer tools such as GitHub, SonarQube Nexus and others that support software development activities.
• Key input into the definition and continual evolution of the strategy for how our SDLC evolves in the light of Agentic AI.
• Accountability and leadership to execute how agentic AI is enabled for development teams.
• Thought leadership across the whole Technology organisation around Agentic AI for coding and other aspects of the SDLC.
• Overall ownership of developer experience including gathering quantitative and qualitative data, driving insight and identifying areas of opportunity.

• Proven experience of leading geographically disparate teams and managing managers.
• Ability to shape strategic direction; deal with ambiguity and operate autonomously in a fast-evolving space making timely decisions without perfect data and be able to operate in an intent-based way vs seeking approval.
• Strong ability to make decisions that balance multiple, often conflicting factors.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills downwards, across and upwards.
• Proven experience in managing significant vendor relationships, evaluating offerings and working effectively with procurement and legal teams.
• Strong understanding of budgets, forecasts and the economics of software development activity and agentic AI.
• Experience of working in an organisation that values product-led and data-led problem definition and discovery.
• A solid understanding of all aspects of a typical SDLC and opinions on where AI can have the biggest impact.
• Prior experience as a hands-on software engineer which allows you to have a strong understanding and empathy of engineers’ needs and views.
• Experience in leading teams who ‘run what they build’, managing effective operational support and on-call engineers.
• Ideally: prior experience of working in a developer experience, platform engineering or similar role.

Skills:

• You are naturally curious and have built up expertise with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or Cursor but you have a bias towards solving problems not dogmatic solutions.
• Ability to keep knowledge up to date through effective building of networks, data sources and ability to identify and distil key trends and directions and then apply context to how you interpret them.
• Strong system design and architecture skills and instincts.
• Exceptional people management skills including how to manage talent and performance and grow the people around you.

You might know us as a supermarket, technology company or even for our award-winning mobile network. Truth is, we’re all of those things, and much more. Our colleagues work with one goal in mind, helping to make every day a little better for our customers, colleagues and communities all over the world. No two customers are the same, neither are our colleagues. At Tesco, we champion a balance that lets you thrive both in and out of work. Spend 60% of your week collaborating with colleagues at our office locations or local sites and the rest remotely. Whether you're just kicking off your career, juggling passions, or navigating big life events, we're here to support you. We always welcome a conversation about flexible working, so talk to us throughout your application about how we can support. We're proud to be an accredited Disability Confident Leader, where everyone’s welcome. That’s why we commit to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process.