Staff Software Engineer - Java (Supply Chain)

Are you energised by solving complex technical challenges? Do you want to influence engineering at scale and shape the future of how millions of customers shop with us every day?

If so, you could be the perfect fit for our Staff Engineer role in the Supply Chain Technology space.

This is your chance to work on high-impact, strategically important initiatives while staying hands‑on with cutting-edge engineering. Join us and play a key role in delivering innovative, scalable solutions across one of the UK’s most advanced retail technology ecosystems.

About the Role

As a Staff Engineer, you'll work across multiple engineering teams, driving technical design, elevating engineering standards and ensuring sound decision-making across the broader Sainsbury’s Tech ecosystem.

You’ll be deeply involved in the architecture and delivery of mission-critical solutions, from microservices and integration layers to cloud-hosted platforms powering our highly complex supply chain systems.

You’ll also act as a coach, mentor and technical guide to engineering teams — helping shape talent, influence direction and drive continuous improvement.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Partnering with the Head of Engineering to define and deliver strategic outcomes across Supply Chain.
• Influencing and guiding technical decisions to ensure scalable, maintainable and secure solutions.
• Using your hands-on engineering expertise to tackle the most challenging problems and unblock teams.
• Coaching and mentoring engineers at all levels to help them perform at their best.
• Promoting strong engineering practices, design principles and high technical standards.
• Leverage AI and intelligent automation to modernise our systems, streamline decision‑making, and ensure the organisation remains future‑fit in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.
• Working with peers across Sainsbury’s Tech to deliver cross-domain solutions and encourage reusability.
• Supporting our engineering entry and development programmes, helping us attract and grow top talent.

Why Join Us?

We’re a 150+ year-old business operating with the mindset of a modern tech organisation:

• 10 million+ Nectar customers providing rich data insights
• Argos ranking as one of the UK’s busiest online retailers
• End‑to‑end supply chain technology operating at huge national scale

Our engineering teams build and run:

• 1,000+ microservices across AWS, Azure and GCP
• Event-driven systems streaming billions of Kafka messages
• Scalable APIs and integrations powering real-time decisioning

You’ll broaden your technical expertise, work with smart people and solve problems that truly matter.

Tech You’ll Be Working With

Java | Python | React | AWS | Kafka | Microservices | APIs | Integration | Agile 

Essential Criteria

Technical Expertise

• Significant hands-on engineering experience in backend, frontend or platform technologies.
• Strong proficiency in one or more key languages (e.g., Java, Python, React).
• Proven experience designing and delivering scalable microservices and cloud-native solutions.
• Understanding of distributed systems, integration patterns and event-driven architecture.
• Ability to evaluate technical decisions, spot risks and guide teams towards strong design choices.

Leadership & Influence

• Proven experience coaching, mentoring or guiding engineers across multiple levels.
• Ability to influence engineering direction across teams and domains.
• Strong communication skills, capable of building trust and alignment across stakeholders.

Ways of Working

• Proven experience working in Agile environments and supporting high-performing, long-lived teams.
• Ability to proactively identify improvement opportunities and drive them to completion.

Mindset & Behaviours

• Passionate about engineering excellence and continuous learning.
• Comfortable working across diverse systems and domains.
• Adaptable, collaborative and motivated by solving complex problems that deliver real value.

What’s in It for You

• Flexible working with a balanced approach to home and office
• Colleague discounts across Sainsbury’s, Argos and Habitat
• Private health cover
• Generous holiday allowance
• Bonus scheme
• Pension plan
• Discounts on gyms, restaurants, holidays, retail and more

If you’re ready to shape the future of one of the UK’s largest retail technology landscapes — we’d love to hear from you.

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.

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. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:
 
 Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.  
 
 Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. 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, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.

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 www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).