Principal Software Development Engineer (Machine Learning Engineer)

We know life looks a little different for each of us. That’s why at Tesco, we always welcome chats about flexible working. Some people are at the start of their careers, some want the freedom to do the things they love. Others are going through life-changing moments like becoming a carer, nearing retirement, adapting to parenthood, or something else. So, talk to us throughout your application about how we can support. We have an exciting opportunity for a Principal Software Development Engineer (PSDE) to join our Data Science Engineering space Bringing your strong expertise in machine learning engineering you will be a senior technical authority, delivering value that materially changes outcomes for the company. Your job will not just be about technical judgement but also about influencing others to deliver results. About the Team: Within Tesco Data Science & Analytics, we help our customers and the communities where we operate get the most value from data. We build and run Tesco’s data platforms, we architect and engineer data onto these platforms, provide capabilities and tools to the analytics community across Tesco, and develop data products at scale. Our Data Science teams are involved in a broad range of projects, spanning across supply chain, logistics, store and online. These include projects in the areas of Operations Optimisations, Decision Support (e.g. Forecasting), Online (e.g. Search and Recommendation) and Intelligent Edge (e.g. Computer Vision). Our Data Science Engineers work alongside our data scientists, helping with everything from development of tools and platforms, code optimisations through to deployment of solutions on the edge, cloud and big-data environments. As a Principal Software Development Engineer within Data Science Engineering you will: Play a key role in shaping large parts of Tesco’s technical landscape. Contribute to strategic planning, combining business vision and industry best practices to define technical strategy and make decisions. Be involved in a number of projects associated with ongoing and new use cases. You will guide large complex programmes of work, working with and influencing the engineering, product, programme, and business teams. Own the design, implementation, and delivery of software that shapes products and technologies. Set technical direction to translate strategy into action, making a significant impact to the organisation. Be a thought leader for large and complex areas, typically working across multiple teams, setting standards for engineering excellence and efficient technical design. Be hands-on, guide teams to improve technology across product portfolios, infrastructure, and processes. Helping teams resolve hard problems, being hands on with design and coding Use your depth of skill and experience to enable multiple teams around you to deliver excellent software quickly. Influencing build vs buy decisions, deprecate legacy software, and lead significant refactoring. You will help make the right trade-offs to influence the roadmap and sequencing of work to deliver early and often. Influencing others through strong communications skills, combined with sufficient breadth and depth of technical knowledge, Leading stakeholders and teams to appropriate decisions with data points and foresight. Build strategy documents, designs and code which are exemplary and serve as a model for others. Innovate and stay ahead of industry trends, competition, and new paradigms and share appropriately. Routinely come up with PoCs to evaluate approaches or technology choices to enable or accelerate programmes. You come from either an Engineering or Data Science background, with a good understanding of the Data Science Toolkit (Programming, Machine Learning, MLOps etc) and bringing data science solutions into production. You therefore tick the majority of the following points: A strong team player who works collaboratively with other members of the team, with experience working in a global team distributed across multiple locations. Very strong understanding of the Software Development Lifecycle. The ability to influence technical teams and senior stakeholders Demonstrable success from working across large engineering organisations, in and across engineering teams in a principal, technical lead or similar role. Demonstrated experience designing, developing and running whole system landscapes. Experience acting as a technical authority across multiple domains and multiple technologies. Experience proposing architectural patterns for adoption by an organisation. Experience guiding large programmes of work, with a track record of driving technical change. Problem solving, analysis and computational skills. You are comfortable designing systems and reasoning about them. When tackling problems, you take a thorough and logical approach to solving them and you retain ownership through to resolution. Customer focus. You can find the right balance between outcome delivery and technical excellence. You place the needs of our customers above the needs of you and the team. Written and verbal communication skills. You can communicate effectively and efficiently taking into account the nature of your audience. An analytical mind set and the ability to tackle specific business problems . Experience and proven success driving the adoption of inner sourcing initiatives. A strong understanding of building secure, robust and maintainable software solutions. Knowledge of Enterprise integration patterns, microservice architectures and event sourcing. Strong experience of automation, configuration management, multi-cloud and hybridisation, IAAS and PAAS. Experience working with open-source Data-Science environments e.g. Spark, Tensorflow, Pandas. Experience building solutions that run in the cloud, ideally Azure. Experience with big data technologies such as Spark and data pipelines. Awareness of emerging MLOps practices and tooling would be an advantage e.g. model lifecycle management. Experience with different programming languages and a good grasp of at least one language. The ideal candidate is fluent in Python. Commercial experience contributing to the success of high impact Data Science projects within complex organisations.