Staff Software Engineer - Java - React (Digital & Payments)

Sainsbury’s Group; City of Westminster; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading UK retailer is looking for a Staff Engineer to enhance digital instore and fulfilment solutions. You will deliver scalable designs and work closely with teams to mentor engineers, set strategic goals, and tackle complex technical challenges. The ideal candidate possesses strong back-end and front-end expertise, especially in Java, React, and Next.js. With a culture that values innovation, this role offers significant opportunities for growth and collaboration.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Colleague discount

Health cover

Holiday allowance

Bonus scheme

Pension plan

Gym membership discounts

Qualifications

• Experience in back-end and front-end technologies.
• Ability to mentor and guide engineering teams.
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making skills.

Responsibilities

• Deliver high-quality, well-designed, robust and scalable solutions.
• Set and achieve strategic goals with the Senior Head of Engineering.
• Act as a technical backbone and coach for engineering teams.

Skills

Technical depth and breadth

Agile mentorship

Java

React

Next.js

Job description

Staff Engineer – Digital Instore, Pick & Fulfilment

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll help us bring together those complex horizontal outcomes that go beyond a single team and area. Throughout, you’ll be working with engineers and 3rd parties to deliver high‑quality, well‑designed, robust and scalable solutions.

Work with the Senior Head of Engineering to set and achieve strategic goals and objectives; help evaluate and drive technical decisions and work with teams to plan the development and support needed to deliver. Work with engineers at all levels, promoting technical standards, sharing your expertise, helping them find the best solutions and providing coaching and mentoring to set the teams for success and help them perform at their best. You will actively work with others to make sure the right challenges are highlighted and that your contribution is genuinely valued across solutions and Engineers.

Work with your peers from across Sainsbury’s Tech to widen your knowledge, deliver broader solutions and ensure reusability of tech and skills across different domains – supporting and building your network of peers. In all, it’s a role that will see you act as a technical backbone, a point of contact and a coach and a guide.

We have plans to expand our engineering entry programmes and want you to be a big part of that too, ensuring that we recruit the best talent and constantly raise the bar.

You’re an experienced and passionate engineer, with both technical depth and breadth. You can take the initiative, evaluate risks and drive continuous improvement to get the best outcomes. You trust your judgement and analysis to contribute to complex decision‑making, yet you also know how to become part of your teams and support them by leading from experience in what they’re doing.

Strong in both technical and Agile mentorship, guiding on the engineering vision and helping them to increase performance. Specializing across back‑end and front‑end technologies and software development, you will bring us programming language expertise and experience of software design and implementation – whether it’s Java, React or Next.js – these are a few of the core programming languages in this space.

Listening and interpersonal skills will be vital to build relationships, influence and adapt to embrace the challenge. Your ability to adapt and embrace the challenge will be essential in your journey through discovering the diversity of our tech and setting a path for big ambitions and bold changes.

What you could do in future: there’s a lot of scope for widening your skills in this role, because it allows you to move into different areas, cover lots of ground and broaden your understanding of how Sainsbury’s works. When you want to take the next step up, a Principal Engineer role would help you build on everything that you’ve already learned and achieved. Your technical understanding will still be in play, but it’ll be as much about looking upwards and outwards – thinking about strategy and where we should be going and solving problems right across the technical organisation.

Are you passionate about new and innovative technology? Do you want to be at the forefront of innovation and the transformation of how Sainsbury’s supports their customers with any issue being faced? If so, you could be the perfect candidate for the Staff Engineering role across the Digital Instore, Pick & Fulfilment space.

Do all this and more. As the Staff Engineer, you will be an individual contributor actively working with engineering teams to embrace the challenges in driving tech design, taking our engineers to the next level, keeping our tech standards high and building relations across engineering teams and stakeholders across Sainsbury’s tech.

The most important bit for you – enjoying being a hands‑on developer and defining where your skills make the most difference. You’ll be tackling those tricky problems and helping to find solutions that will scale, delivering results for our customers and creating strategic value for Sainsbury’s.

Working across the complex end‑to‑end architecture on cutting‑edge solutions for our customers, scaling the volumes of contacts and using AI capabilities to excel through the automation of our colleague and customer experiences as well as how we use our tools.

Being obsessed with the customer is at the heart of everything we do. With technology we are changing the world we live in for the better. Shouldn’t you be part of this?

Why join us? We’re a 150+ year‑old business that operates on an incredible scale. There’s data from our 10 million+ Nectar users, days like Black Friday that make Argos the 3rd biggest website in the UK, and supply‑chain integration that gets the right products to the right locations on time, every time. The tech we use is bang up to date (state of the art), whether we’re in the cloud deploying over 1,000 microservices into AWS, Azure & GCP or streaming billions of messages on Kafka and building event‑based solutions. This is where you can broaden your technical knowledge and help solve complex problems while using your Agile skills to develop our long‑lived teams.

• Flexible working – tailored approach to balance your working from home and collaboration in the office, sensible freedom to shape your week and day working hours, offices in different locations
• Colleague discount across our brands – Sainsbury’s, Argos and Habitat
• Health cover
• Holiday allowance
• Bonus scheme
• Pension plan
• Special offers on gym memberships, restaurants, holidays, retail vouchers and more

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whatever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new – whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business – and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working.

When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of 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 may be eligible for a performance‑related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform. Your 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, interest‑free car loan of up to £10k, cycle‑to‑work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance and access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. If you ever need it, there is an Employee Assistance Programme and you’ll also be eligible for private healthcare. We give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.