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The Partnership is the UK’s most successful omnichannel retailer which includes two of the UK’s most loved department store and grocery brands with annual sales revenues in excess of £12B. Waitrose Commercial is responsible for ensuring that Waitrose have the right products to sell, at the right price across all Waitrose sales channels. It is also responsible for making sure the business has enough stock for customers in the place they want it, across our omnichannel business. The technology supporting Waitrose Commercial is a blend of commercially available third-party platforms, bespoke in-house systems, and tightly coupled mainframe legacy applications, all interconnected through integrations with other areas of the business. These systems must not only be highly resilient but also adaptable, enabling us to enhance operational efficiency and respond to evolving business needs.
Job Responsibility:
Align the engineering strategy and roadmap for Waitrose Commercial with the overarching business objectives
Influence key decisions that shape the operation of Waitrose Commercial systems and guide how engineering drives change
Influence how work is managed—whether agile, waterfall, or hybrid— including the effectiveness and measurement of teams
Ensure engineering practices align with the broader Partnership engineering strategy
Influence team structure, balance, and resource models
Collaborate closely with key stakeholders such as Product Leads/Business Owners, Delivery and Operations Managers, Infrastructure Leads and Enterprise Architects as well as Senior Staff Engineers, specialist engineering teams and third-parties
Work closely with other Principal Engineers in JLP
Help modernise and simplify a complex heritage tech stack to enable both business agility and productivity, as well as improve system maintainability
Lead on the uplift of the engineering capability and approaches in Commercial
Help move away from project based ways of working in order to establish Product teams and agile practices
Change how we work with our suppliers.
Requirements:
Engineering background with real world experience of modern software engineering techniques such as Continuous Delivery and ideally experience of using strategic patterns of Domain Driven Design
Experience of the technical implementation of package solutions (such as SaaS) into large complex environments
Experience in senior leadership role, leading across multiple teams, working with senior stakeholders and influencing multi-million pound investments in engineering
Knowledge/experience of working with different architectural styles (e.g. monolith, service based, microservices) and integration patterns when working with different platforms (broker models, RESTful, streams, event based)
Knowledge/experience of techniques used to increase resilience and/or scalability of systems
Experience of applying techniques from Lean and Systems Thinking
Experience of working with legacy systems
Worked with third-party development suppliers across a range of different commercial constructs
Will have been a hands-on software engineer for part of their career.
Nice to have:
Retail experience
Engineering management role, working across multiple teams or architecture role working across a large part of an enterprise
Experience of agile transformation
What we offer:
Leisure Learning - up to £200 towards certain tutored courses
Partner Discount - 25% off at John Lewis and 20% at Waitrose