Senior Search Engineer - Kotlin / ElasticSearch

Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits

Location: Holborn Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1N 2HT

Contract type: Permanent

Business area: Sainsbury's Tech

Requisition ID: 189176

We'd all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That's waiting for you at Sainsbury's. Think about the scale it takes for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you'll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We've made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.

As Senior Engineer, you'll be part of one of our Engineering teams, applying architectural and engineering principles to define and deliver technology that will better customer experiences, improve efficiency, and reduce business costs, helping us to lower prices. You'll support your team by enabling performance, compliance, and risk management by sharing your expertise, judgment, and passion for delivering quality products for customers.

The role

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to grow our Search and Product Recommendations Platform team. It is an autonomous, agile product development team building microservices that ensure the results of our customer searches across our multiple brands and channels are accurate and relevant. The team builds high performing microservices by interpreting and following best practice architectural and engineering principles, operating frameworks, and modern tech solutions. This is a fantastic opportunity to work in a domain where we have a huge impact on millions of our customers and drive significant incremental sales for our business.

More about the role

• Coding in Java/Kotlin with tools and frameworks like Spring Boot and Gradle.
• Working on cloud and container technologies such as EMR on AWS and Kubernetes.
• Producing test-driven features and demonstrating your familiarity with the TDD cycle.
• Lead the design, development, and ultimately operation of the search and recommendations engine at scale.
• Be responsible for the quality, performance, and stability of the system.
• Work with other teams to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve high impact issues.
• Write high quality code, automated tests, and adhere to engineering best practices.
• Identify and guide the adoption of best practices in code development, continuous integration (CI), testability, and maintainability.
• Propose and implement new features based on an analysis of customer requirements, industry trends, and competitive offerings.

More about you

• Experience with Elasticsearch or a NoSQL document store.
• Experience with AWS cloud.
• Experience with building Event driven applications with the likes of Kafka.
• Proven experience in software design and implementation, security, cloud, infrastructure as code and CI/CD.
• Drive for advocacy of agile/lean delivery methodologies.
• A passion for delivering solutions to customers, owning the whole software development lifecycle, and living the DevSecOps principles.
• A passion for enhancing your knowledge and evidence curiosity in emerging tech.
• Display empathy and understanding in supporting colleagues in the team to deliver.
• Good spoken and written English.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you'll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there's always the chance to try something new - whether that's as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance, as well as access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks' pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks' pay for paternity leave.

Please see for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).