Senior Engineer

About the role

As a Senior Data Engineer (Java), you will be a key technical leader across multiple teams, acting as a design authority within the domain and applying strong architectural and engineering principles to shape technology that improves customer experiences, drives efficiency and reduces business costs. You will lead the design and development of real‑time analytics for sales data, using Java 17+, Spring Boot, Maven, Docker and Kafka on Kubernetes, and oversee scalability, resilience, observability, operational support and performance.

Responsibilities

• Act as technical design lead for the Sales Transaction Service (STS), shaping scalable event‑driven solutions that process high‑volume sales transactions and support downstream consumers.
• Define and promote good practices for observability, performance, testing, data quality, compliance and risk management across STS stream processing services.
• Mentor engineers through design discussions, code reviews, incident support and effective adoption of new tools and ways of working.
• Participate in on‑call rotation, supporting production incidents, restoring service quickly and maintaining confidence in business‑critical transaction flows.

About you

• Strong engineering judgement and deep knowledge of software design, distributed systems and modern architecture principles.
• Track record of shaping technical direction, influencing others and raising engineering standards across teams.
• Confidence to guide, support and challenge others on design decisions, security, quality and operational excellence.
• Strong belief in agile and lean delivery, balancing pace with quality, resilience and long‑term sustainability.
• Passion for secure, customer‑focused engineering and DevSecOps ways of working, delivering high‑quality products.
• Curiosity about new technologies and a proactive approach to improving team practices, engineering culture and ways of working.

Essential criteria

• Strong Java skills, with the ability to guide implementation, refactor complex code and review technically challenging changes.
• Deep experience building, deploying and supporting Kafka‑based services that process and enrich high‑volume transaction events in production.
• Strong experience with CI/CD, containerisation, infrastructure as code, monitoring, alerting and broader observability practices.
• Proven experience leading technical design across teams and turning business goals into practical, scalable solutions.
• Strong testing knowledge, including strategy, automation, performance testing and maintaining confidence in changes to business‑critical transaction flows.

Nice to have

• Experience creating reusable engineering patterns, shared components or standards that support multiple teams or domains.
• Experience with data warehousing and analytics platforms, particularly Snowflake and related tooling.
• Exposure to orchestration and batch processing tools such as Airflow, along with working knowledge of Python and SQL.
• Experience with modern data modelling approaches, including raw data vault and dimensional modelling techniques.

Benefits

• Colleague discount across Sainsbury’s, Argos and Habitat.
• 10% time for side projects and personal development.
• Generous holiday allowance, with the option to buy more.
• Bonus scheme of up to 20% of salary.
• Pension plan.
• Special offers on gyms, restaurants, holidays, retail vouchers and more.

We offer flexible working arrangements and a supportive environment that encourages learning, innovation and work‑life balance.

#J-18808-Ljbffr…