Lead Software Engineer - Retail Technology

Our software engineering teams are responsible for designing, building, integrating, and managing technology across all products and functions. They focus on developing secure, highly available, cloud-based solutions, utilising open-source technologies where appropriate. By employing APIs as a standard for integration, they facilitate robust communication between internal and external systems. Our teams adopt data and event-driven approaches, working iteratively and continuously to deliver high-quality solutions.

This role sits within our Retail Technology team, they own the creation and maintenance of our product catalogue and the prices we sell products at. We set pricing strategy, including when to run offers and which types of promotions to use. We manage product set-up end to end, on-site copy, categorisation, and navigation to help customers find products easily.

We also manage supplier contracts, stock planning, and forecasting to ensure timely replenishment. The Retail team are looking to leverage AI capability to improve our price decisioning process to improve our margin as an organisation and better value for our customers. Along side this we want to create more bespoke product copy and attribution so customers can find the products they want more easily. The roles will be linked to new squads being set up to deliver these initiatives and maintain, run and enhance them going forward.

Role Purpose

The Lead Engineer is a key role within a Software or Data Engineering sub-community providing technical leadership and guidance to Engineers across all squads working with them to deliver and maintain production ready, secure, stable, and performant code in line with TVG Engineering standards in a DevSecOps manner.

They lead by example and play an active part of software design, coding, reviews, testing, and debugging.

They are at the forefront of solving challenging technical problems, and are responsible for software engineering excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement within the sub-community across all squads they work with.

Scope of Role

Leadership:

• Technical mentor and coach to Software/Data Engineers empowering them to excel in their roles and grow their skills.
• Champions the adoption of relevant standards such as TVG's SDLC, development of re-usable components, and generation of technical product roadmaps in collaboration with Engineering Managers and Architects.
• Plays an active role in maintaining a high performing software engineering team and contributes to a positive and inclusive culture where collaboration, open communication, and knowledge sharing are the norm and highly valued.
• Play a leading role in the Software technology selection for the squads they work with.
• The role is one of a technical expert and leader rather than people manager and may involve task management at times.

Nature and Area of impact:

• The Lead Engineer works with peers in other sub-communities and other Technology leaders to advance TVG's Tech landscape in a manner that is aligned across the Community and is aligned to current standards and policies.
• Responsible for ensuring technology is right sized and pro-actively identifying cost optimisation opportunities.

• Significant experience of delivery of software solutions in squads operating in a lean, agile, DevSecOps based environment, in a senior or leadership role.
• Proficiency in multiple programming languages, frameworks, and modern software engineering tooling.
• Demonstrable experience of providing clear technology leadership, direction and decision making for a whole team.
• Experience of building, integrating, maintaining, and managing complex software architectures (both build and bought), ideally across multi-cloud environments.
• Experience of building software applications that have security, reliability, scalability, high availability, and concurrency built-in from the outset.
• A strong collaborator, communicator, and decision maker.
• Confident and comfortable to share stories internally and externally to build our Very Group brand and credibility to attract and retain talent.

Some of our benefits

• Flexible, hybrid working model
• Inclusive culture and environment

We're the team behind digital retailer Very. Our purpose, helping families get more out of life, powers everything we do. And we want our people to get more out of life too! If you're high-performing, ambitious and make the most of every opportunity, we want to hear from you. In return, you'll enjoy heaps of flexibility, great perks and benefits, and the freedom to be yourself, keep learning and take your career wherever you want it to go. If you love making a difference, you'll love making it sparkle for millions of Very customers. ?