Senior Backend AI Engineer

The AI Engineering team at Tesco Technology is responsible for building and scaling intelligent systems that support millions of customers and colleagues every day. We work across four key pillars - customer, colleague, vendor, and operations to create AI-driven experiences and insights that improve how Tesco operates at scale. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will play a critical role in delivering the technical backbone that enables these capabilities. This includes designing and building robust APIs, services, and data pipelines that power both internal AI use cases (e.g. colleague insights and operational decision-making) and customer-facing applications that help customers find what they need more effectively. Working as part of a central AI Engineering team, you’ll operate at the intersection of product engineering and platform enablement, building scalable services that allow AI engineers to safely and efficiently bring models into production whilst also considering reusability. This is an opportunity to work on complex, high-impact problems such as scaling AI capabilities across an enterprise, ensuring reusability across use cases, and supporting the safe and effective adoption of emerging AI technologies. You’ll collaborate closely with AI engineers and product teams, gaining exposure to modern AI systems including LLMs, inference services, and evaluation pipelines while remaining focused on engineering excellence in backend systems. You will be responsible for

• Designing and building scalable APIs, backend services, and data pipelines that underpin AI-powered products and internal capabilities
• Owning end-to-end delivery of systems that support multiple AI use cases across customer, colleague, vendor, and operations domains
• Driving technical design and system architecture discussions, shaping how AI-backed services are built and integrated across teams
• Building reusable and extensible services that enable rapid development of new AI use cases without duplication
• Collaborating closely with AI engineers to operationalise models, including integration with inference services, evaluation workflows, and guardrails
• Ensuring systems are reliable, observable, and production-ready, supporting critical business workflows at scale
• Influencing engineering standards and best practices within the AI space, contributing to a consistent and scalable approach
• Working across team boundaries to support cross-functional delivery and alignment within a central AI function
• Mentoring, sharing knowledge and supporting other engineers, helping to raise the bar for backend engineering across the organisation
• Producing test-driven features and demonstrating your familiarity with the TDD cycle.
• Applying your understanding of cohesion and the SOLID principles to create well structured, maintainable software.
• Working effectively with product stakeholders to communicate and translate needs into product improvements.
• Leading group discussions on system design and working with Product Managers to drive value.
• Supporting production systems, resolving incidents, and performing root cause analysis.

• Strong backend engineering experience with Python, building and operating production-grade services and APIs
• Experience with cloud platform, ideally Azure but could be AWS or GCP
• Experience with both SQL/NoSQL databases
• Experience working in environments with multiple stakeholders and cross-team dependencies
• Exposure to AI/ML systems in production (e.g. model integration, inference pipelines, or data workflows) is highly desirable
• Strong focus on end users of products and a customer first mindset.
• Strong system design and architectural thinking, with the ability to design for reuse and scale
• Strong collaboration and communication skills across engineering, product, and AI disciplines
• An interest in modern AI technologies (e.g. LLMs, vector search, inference platforms such as Mistral) and how they are applied in real-world systems
• An innovative and dynamic approach to problem-solving, analysis and computational skills.

• 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.
• This information is a shortened summary, refer to our policies for full details.