Software Development Engineer III

Job Description

The Product & Engineering team is responsible for designing, building and scaling Data & AI products that power intelligent experiences, decisions and actions across the Tesco ecosystem. Working in close partnership with business and technology teams across Stores, Finance, People, Customer and Commercial, we enable the seamless build, integration and adoption of Data & AI capabilities that deliver measurable value.
This is an opportunity to play a leading role in shaping a new generation of Data & AI products, from problem definition through to launch and scale, driving meaningful impact for Tesco colleagues and the wider business.
This is a hybrid role with the expectation of being based at our London and Welwyn Garden City offices 3 days a week.
The Software Development Engineer III is a senior, hands on engineer specialising in building and operating GenAI powered products, including LLM based applications and agentic workflows that enable intelligent decision making and automation. The role spans the full product lifecycle, translating complex business problems into production grade solutions across data, backend services, APIs and user facing applications, with a strong focus on reliability, guardrails and real user impact. The role also provides technical leadership by designing shared GenAI capabilities, supporting live systems and raising engineering and AI delivery standards across the team through mentoring and rigorous design practice.
• Data & AI Product Development: Take ideas from discovery through rapid prototypes to production grade solutions that combine data, user facing applications and backend services. • Work closely with product managers, designers, data science and engineering teams to translate business needs into well designed technical solutions. • Design and deliver LLM based applications and AI agents that enable intelligent decision making and automation, applying pragmatic engineering patterns and appropriate guardrails. • Design and consume APIs that support responsive, intuitive UIs, working across backend, data and frontend layers to deliver coherent, production-ready experiences. • Build shared capabilities (libraries, templates, services, prompts/config patterns, evaluation suites) that reduce duplication and enable other squads to adopt GenAI safely and consistently. • Support and operate live systems, troubleshoot complex issues, perform root cause analysis and continuously improve reliability, quality and speed of delivery. • Build and maintain web-based user interfaces using React.js, modern JavaScript / TypeScript, HTML and CSS, enabling colleagues to interact effectively with data and AI based tools. • Technical Excellence: Promote strong software engineering practices across backend and frontend development, including CI/CD, testing, secure by default development, performance optimisation and observability. • Support and operate live systems, troubleshoot complex issues, perform root cause analysis and continuously improve reliability, quality and speed of delivery. • Technical Leadership: Provide hands-on technical leadership through design reviews, mentoring and knowledge sharing, helping raise engineering standards across the team.
• Strong experience as a senior software engineer delivering and operating production systems. • Solid backend engineering experience (e.g. Python or similar), including API design, testing, CI/CD and operational support. • Practical experience building LLM-powered applications (e.g. copilots, assistants, agent based workflows), with a focus on reliability and real user impact. • Good working knowledge of React.js and modern JavaScript / TypeScript, with experience building and maintaining production web interfaces. • Proficiency with HTML and CSS, and an understanding of usability, accessibility and performance considerations. • Experience working across data, backend and UI layers, collaborating with others rather than owning every layer in isolation. • Ability to make thoughtful technical trade offs, communicate clearly with both technical and non technical stakeholders and work effectively in a product led team. Our vision at Tesco is to become every customer's favourite way to shop, whether they are at home or out on the move. Our core purpose is ‘Serving our customers, communities and planet a little better every day’. Serving means more than a transactional relationship with our customers. It means acting as a responsible and sustainable business for all stakeholders, for the communities we are part of and for the planet. We are proud to have an inclusive culture at Tesco where everyone truly feels able to be themselves. At Tesco, we not only celebrate diversity, but recognise the value and opportunity it brings. We're committed to creating a workplace where differences are valued, and make sure that all colleagues are given the same opportunities. We’re proud to have been accredited Disability Confident Leader and we’re committed to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process. For further information on the accessibility support we can offer, please click here. We’re a big business and we can offer a range of diverse full-time & part-time working patterns across our many business areas, which means that we can find something that works for you. We work in a more blended pattern - combining office and remote working. Our offices will continue to be where we connect, collaborate and innovate. If you are applying internally, please speak to the Hiring Manager about how this can work for you - Everyone is welcome at Tesco.