Software Development Engineer - Personalisation

Tesco; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 125,000; Full time

Job summary

Tesco's Personalisation team is hiring a backend engineer to build real-time recommendations, offers, targeting, and experimentation across web, mobile and in-store channels. You'll tackle low-latency services, streaming data, and ML-powered decisions at scale, collaborating with product, data science, and analytics to turn customer insights into action.

The role emphasizes Java backend development, microservices, and event-driven systems, with exposure to Kafka, Flink/Beam, NoSQL stores, and

Qualifications

• Strong Java backend experience.
• Experience building microservices and REST/ gRPC APIs.
• Understanding of event-driven systems and streaming concepts.
• Knowledge of distributed systems and scalable architectures.

Responsibilities

• Build low-latency, high-throughput personalisation services.
• Develop Java/Spring Boot microservices with REST/gRPC APIs.
• Work with Kafka and event-driven architectures.
• Build pipelines using Apache Flink and Apache Beam.
• Integrate ML models and feature stores.
• Work with NoSQL databases and Redis caching.
• Collaborate with product, data science, and analytics teams.
• Write automated tests and improve reliability.
• Monitor systems and support CI/CD pipelines.
• Contribute to experimentation (A/B testing).

Skills

Java backend

Microservices

Event-driven systems

Stream processing

Distributed systems

Data-driven personalization

Communication & teamwork

Tools

Kafka

Apache Camel

NoSQL databases

Redis

Docker

Kubernetes

ML feature stores

Flink

Beam

Job description

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 ofcustomers 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 MLpowered 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.

• 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

• 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

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.