Software Development Engineer II - Personalistion

Tesco; Greater London; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus up to 20%

Holiday 25 days + personal day

Private medical insurance

Maternity/adoption leave (26 weeks) +

Paternity leave

Virtual GP & EAP

Job summary

Tesco UK in London is hiring a backend engineer to help power real-time personalization across web, mobile, and in-store channels. The role focuses on building low-latency services, Java/Spring Boot microservices, and event-driven architectures.

You will work with Kafka, Flink/Beam, and ML feature integration within a collaborative product and data analytics environment. Join a team delivering scalable personalization, supporting CI/CD, and contributing to experimentation to improve customer

Qualifications

• Strong Java backend experience.

Responsibilities

• Build low-latency, high-throughput services for personalisation.

Skills

Java backend

Microservices

Event-driven architectures

Distributed systems

Communication and teamwork

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

Apache Flink

Apache Beam

NoSQL (Cassandra, DynamoDB)

Redis

REST/gRPC APIs

Apache Camel

Job description

Tesco UK • London • Hybrid • Full-Time • Permanent • Working hours 36 • Apply by 02-Nov-2026

Every customer is different, and we're building the technology to make every Tesco experience feel personal. Join Tesco's Personalisation team and help shape the experiences of millions of customers every day by powering real-time recommendations, offers, targeting, and experimentation across our web, mobile, and in-store channels. Our platforms combine real-time data, machine learning, and large-scale distributed systems to turn customer insights into intelligent decisions in milliseconds. You'll work on complex engineering challenges spanning streaming data, low-latency decisioning services, and ML powered systems, while collaborating closely with product, data science, and analytics teams. This is an opportunity to build technology at significant scale, influence the evolution of our personalisation platform, and directly impact how millions of customers discover, shop, and save with Tesco.

What is in it for you

We're all about the little helps. That's why we make sure our Tesco colleague benefits package takes care of you - both in and out of work.

• Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary.


• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus Bank holidays).


• Private medical insurance.


• 26 weeks maternity and adoption leave (12 months service required at the qualifying date) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, we also offer 6 weeks fully paid paternity leave.


• Free 24/7 virtual GP service, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for you and your family, free access to a range of experts to support your mental wellbeing.

The above information is a shortened summary, refer to our policies for full details

You will be responsible for

• Building low-latency, high-throughput services for personalisation


• Developing Java / Spring Boot microservices with REST/gRPC APIs


• Working with Kafka and event-driven architectures


• Building pipelines using Apache Flink and Apache Beam


• Integrating ML models and feature stores


• Working with NoSQL databases and Redis caching


• Using Apache Camel for integration where required


• Collaborating with product, data science, and analytics teams


• Writing automated tests and improving reliability


• Monitoring systems using New Relic, Splunk, and metrics platforms


• Supporting CI/CD pipelines and deployments


• Contributing to experimentation (A/B testing)

You will need

• Strong Java backend experience


• Experience building microservices and APIs


• Understanding of event-driven systems


• Familiarity with stream processing concepts


• Knowledge of distributed systems


• Strong communication and teamwork skills


• Interest in data-driven personalisation systems


• Nice to have


• Experience with Apache Flink and Apache Beam


• Experience with Kafka


• Familiarity with Apache Camel


• Experience with NoSQL databases (Cassandra, DynamoDB) and Redis


• Cloud experience (GCP or AWS)


• Docker and Kubernetes


• ML model serving or feature stores


• A/B testing platforms


• Terraform or infrastructure as code


• Performance and scalability optimisation

About us

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. If you need support with your application, for more information. And if you're interested in joining our team but don't tick every box, don't let that hold you back from applying.