Overview

Sainsburys Tech - Engineer

As a Python Data Software Engineer, you’ll be part of a multi-disciplinary team building scalable data solutions that power operational decision-making across Sainsbury’s. You’ll work closely with data architects, analysts, and engineers to design and implement robust data pipelines and services using Python and cloud-native technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain data pipelines using Python, Kafka, SQL, and cloud services (AWS preferred).
• Build services to expose data for internal applications and analytics platforms.
• Optimise data ingestion, transformation, and storage processes for performance and reliability.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to understand data requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
• Apply software engineering best practices including version control (Git), CI/CD, automated testing, and code reviews.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and help shape the engineering strategy for data products.
• Implement and maintain monitoring and observability solutions to ensure data systems are reliable, performant, and transparent.

Essential Criteria

• Background in software engineering with a strong focus on data systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python, with experience in building production-grade data applications.
• Solid understanding of SQL and data modelling principles.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), especially data services like S3, Lambda, Glue, or Redshift.
• Knowledge of containerisation (Docker) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CloudFormation).
• Ability to work in agile teams and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Desirable

• Familiarity with Kafka and AVRO is a plus.
• Experience with dbt, Poetry, or Conduktor.
• Exposure to data privacy and PII handling best practices.
• Knowledge of orchestration tools (i.e. Airflow)

Benefits and Working Culture

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 10% 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, 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.

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).

Responsibilities

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.