Principal Software Engineer

ASDA; Leeds; Hybrid; GBP 65,000 - 85,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in retail technology is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join their Engineering Excellence team in Leeds. This role focuses on enhancing efficiency across engineering teams, driving modern architectural adoption, and implementing DevSecOps principles. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in engineering development and a strong collaborative mindset.

Benefits

26 days annual leave plus bank holidays

Discretionary company bonus

Company pension matching

Company car allowance

Employee discounts

Healthcare services

Wellbeing support

Flexible working hours

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering and development.
• Proven experience with modern architecture patterns and CI/CD.
• Strong understanding of Agile methodologies.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering teams to deliver robust solutions.
• Mentor and coach engineers on best practices.
• Drive DevSecOps practices and automate development life cycle.

Skills

Collaboration

Problem Solving

Communication

Creativity

Agile methodologies

Mentoring

DevSecOps

Education

Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Microsoft Azure DevOps

Terraform

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Job Title

Principal Software Engineer

Location

Asda House

Employment Type

Full time

Contract Type

Permanent

Hours per Week

37.5

Salary

Competitive Salary plus benefits

Category

Software Engineering

Closing Date

22 June 2025

Engineering Excellence – Principal Software Engineer

“Everything about Asda”

We are a values-led organisation. As such we encourage everyone to be open and honest. We work creatively and collaboratively, valuing everyone’s input.

Our collaborative culture, the size of our business and our belief in the empowerment of the individual means opportunities at Asda are abundant.

We conduct £300m worth of transactions every week. Our website handles over 2 million transactions a month. We have more than 145,000 dedicated Asda colleagues ensuring that our customers are at the heart of everything we do.

“Everything you’ll love”

• Starting 26 days annual leave per year plus 8 bank holidays – Making sure you take time for yourself and switch off

• 4 weekly pay – which means you get an extra payday a year

• Digital GP and Wellbeing sessions – Asda genuinely cares so we create a culture where our people can perform at their best, the physical health and mental wellbeing of all our people is very important to us

• Discount off your shopping at Asda and George - with extra discounts running throughout the year – really makes a difference, saving the colleagues an average of £700 a year

• Career development and apprenticeship and graduate schemes - we want our colleagues to excel and grow with our business. (Link to grad scheme on Asda page)

• Free city centre parking – you can also use it outside working hours

Plus, much more!

What You'll Love

We’re looking for a DevSecOps focussed Principal Software Engineer to be part of our Engineering Excellence team.

Our Mission: Increase efficiency and agility across engineering teams enabling them to mobilise quickly and deliver quality, secure, right first-time features for our customers at reduced costs.

Enable operations teams to pro-actively monitor and quickly report across critical systems.

A Principal Software Engineer reports into the Head of Engineering and drives the delivery of our mission through a combination of design, build & implementation activity together with working alongside multiple engineering teams across the department, supporting them to adopt new ways of working.

This role will be key in driving the adoption of modern architecture and trends such as DevSecOps and Cloud Native technology platforms. The role will involve strong collaboration with others - be it learning from examples of existing great engineering work, collaborating with others to create it or mentoring engineers to use it.

Your Role

• Provide technical expertise, ship brilliantly and operate with excellence

• Understand the key department issues and priorities and leading by example, work with the team to ensure the design and delivery of robust solutions to address them

• Lead the engineers to build and maintain high quality and reliable blueprints/templates which can be rolled out as standard to wider Engineering teams

• Direct, coach and inspire technology standards and best practice within the engineering teams e.g. SOLID development principles, shift-left of testing and continuous integration/delivery

• Help shape the future use of Jira & Confluence throughout the Technology department, collaborating with users to understand their needs and working with the Engineering Manager to design the target state

• Own the engineering excellence of our teams e.g. behaviours, operations and technical quality

• Work with the wider technology function to shape the technical strategy, adopting North Star principles

• Support other engineers to produce clean, quality code through code reviews and mentoring

• Drive DevSecOps best practices to automate the product development life cycle

What You'll Need

• Highly creative, pro-active, enthusiastic, conscientious, detail-oriented self-starter

• Highly resilient, employing a relentless can-do attitude in the face of adversity

• Excellent collaboration and problem-solving skills

• Exceptional presentation, inter-personal, written and communication skills

• Come from a strong engineering / development background and may have moved into a tech lead/ hands-on solution architect type role

• Familiar with Agile methodologies (XP, Kanban, Scrum, SAFe) and proven experience embedding agile ways of working

• Experience with modern architecture patterns e.g. micro-services, micro-frontend, event-based architecture, headless UI, serverless & low code frameworks

• DevOps/Automation (CI/CD) for large scale delivery using Microsoft Azure DevOps, Terraform or similar IaC

• Hands on expertise with monitoring and alerting tools like New Relic, Azure Monitor and Azure App Insights

• Excellent collaboration, mentoring and stakeholder management skills

• Be an advocate for strategy and work with different teams to implement

• Able to demonstrate creativity and innovation in applying solutions for the benefit of the customer/stakeholder

• Access to professional development resources and training is provided

• We have active colleague teams, such as our Women in Digital & Tech team, that support women and other underrepresented groups in tech. We’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and encourage applications from all backgrounds.

• If flexible working is important to you, then look no further! At Asda, we are proud of our culture and our commitment to flexible working. This role is Leeds based in Asda House with the flexibility to work from home several days a week depending on workload.

If you have any questions, then please email [e-mail]

Everything you'll love

To ensure we balance moments where we know we need to collaborate together and the need for flexibility, Asda has a hybrid way of working with a minimum 3 days a week in one of our Home Offices. Over and above this, each area of Asda may have additional requirements which may require spending more days in the office, visiting suppliers, stores or depots.

You will also get an excellent benefits package including:

• Discretionary company bonus
• Company pension up 1.5 times colleagues' contribution (Max 15%)
• Company Car allowance of £8000
• 15% colleague discount in store and online
• Free access to wellbeing services such as Wagestream
• 24/7 virtual GP, counselling, health and dental cash plans and a 24/7 employee assistance helpline, alongside discounts across a range of services and activities, from airport parking, enhanced to theme parks and cinemas
• Asda Allies Inclusion Networks – helping colleagues to make sure everybody is included and that our differences are recognised and celebrated
• Excellent parental leave policies, including maternity & adoption leave, paternity leave, shared parental leave, neonatal care leave, and support for those doing fertility treatments.

We want all colleagues to be able to bring their best and true selves to work, every day. Simply put, we want our colleagues to be Proud to be Asda and proud to be themselves