Engineering Manager

The Clothing technology programme is transforming the capabilities that support how Sainsbury’s plans, allocates and manages Clothing across its estate. This programme will introduce new planning capabilities while integrating with a broad existing technology landscape .

You will be joining at an important stage as we commence Blueprinting and design. This provides an opportunity to influence the technology, engineering practices and team structures that will support Clothing for the long term.Working closely with our technology partners alongside Sainsbury’s engineering teams, you'll ensure we retain strong internal ownership of our architecture, engineering decisions and outcomes.

• →Lead and develop a multi-skilled engineering team responsible for delivering technology capabilities across the Clothing programme.
• →Establish clear engineering ownership from design through build, testing, implementation and ongoing operation.
• →Work closely with Product, Architecture and business teams to translate business outcomes into clear technical priorities and an executable engineering roadmap.
• →Shape the engineering approach as the programme moves from Blueprinting and detailed design into delivery, ensuring solutions are scalable, maintainable, secure and operationally resilient.
• →Build, coach and develop engineers, creating an inclusive environment that encourages ownership, collaboration, learning and high performance.
• →Take end-to-end ownership of engineering outcomes across the programme, ensuring dependencies across applications, integrations, data, testing and operational services are understood and actively managed.
• →Lead through influence across internal engineering teams and strategic technology partners, providing clear technical leadership and ensuring engineering accountability remains within Sainsbury’s.
• →Champion strong engineering practices including automation, CI/CD, observability, automated testing, secure engineering, API and event-driven design and effective service management.
• →Drive a strong quality culture, ensuring testing, operability, resilience and non-functional requirements are considered from the beginning rather than towards the end of delivery.
• →Explore and embed appropriate AI-enabled engineering practices that improve developer productivity, testing, documentation, analysis and engineering decision-making.
• →Identify opportunities where emerging technologies, automation and AI could simplify existing processes or create new capabilities for Clothing.
• →Manage multiple engineering priorities and dependencies while maintaining focus on the outcomes that matter most to customers and the business.
• →Contribute to engineering workforce planning, recruitment and capability development as the Clothing engineering organisation grows.
• →Manage relevant initiative-level budgets and supplier engineering activity, ensuring investment is aligned to agreed outcomes.
• →Ensure appropriate governance, engineering standards, risk management and operational controls are embedded throughout delivery.

• →Experience building and leading engineering teams, including people leadership, coaching, objective setting, performance management and developing engineering capability.
• →Experience delivering complex end-to-end technology solutions, including large-scale transformation programmes.
• →Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, including APIs, event-driven and distributed architectures, cloud engineering, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, resilience, operational support, SaaS/enterprise platforms and complex data and integration landscapes.
• →Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to communicate technical options and trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences, work effectively with third-party technology suppliers, and maintain strong internal engineering ownership while providing structure and direction through ambiguity.
• →Experience or strong practical understanding of AI and emerging technologies, including identifying opportunities to embed AI within engineering teams and technology products, and introducing AI-assisted software engineering, test automation, data engineering or developer productivity capabilities.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever 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. Here are some of them:
 
 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'll also be able to share in our success as 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 (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave. 
 
 Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).