About the role
The AI Engineering team at Tesco Technology is responsible for building and scaling intelligent systems that support millions of customers and colleagues every day. The team works across four key pillars – customer, colleague, vendor, and operations – to create AI-driven experiences and insights that improve how Tesco operates at scale.
As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design and build robust APIs, services, and data pipelines that power internal AI use cases and customer‑facing applications. You will operate at the intersection of product engineering and platform enablement, building scalable services that allow AI engineers to bring models into production safely and efficiently while ensuring reusability.
This role focuses on complex, high‑impact problems such as scaling AI capabilities across an enterprise, ensuring reusability across use cases, and supporting safe and effective adoption of emerging AI technologies. You will collaborate closely with AI engineers and product teams, gaining exposure to modern AI systems (LLMs, inference services, evaluation pipelines) while maintaining engineering excellence in backend systems.
You will be responsible for
- Designing and building scalable APIs, backend services, and data pipelines that underpin AI‑powered products and internal capabilities
- Owning end‑to‑end delivery of systems that support multiple AI use cases across customer, colleague, vendor, and operations domains
- Driving technical design and system architecture discussions, shaping how AI‑backed services are built and integrated across teams
- Building reusable and extensible services that enable rapid development of new AI use cases without duplication
- Collaborating closely with AI engineers to operationalise models, including integration with inference services, evaluation workflows, and guardrails
- Ensuring systems are reliable, observable, and production‑ready, supporting critical business workflows at scale
- Influencing engineering standards and best practices within the AI space, contributing to a consistent and scalable approach
- Working across team boundaries to support cross‑functional delivery and alignment within a central AI function
- Mentoring, sharing knowledge, and supporting other engineers, helping to raise the bar for backend engineering across the organisation
- Producing test‑driven features and demonstrating familiarity with the TDD cycle
- Applying your understanding of cohesion and SOLID principles to create well‑structured, maintainable software
- Working effectively with product stakeholders to communicate and translate needs into product improvements
- Leading group discussions on system design and working with Product Managers to drive value
- Supporting production systems, resolving incidents, and performing root‑cause analysis
You will need
- Strong backend engineering experience with Python, building and operating production‑grade services and APIs
- Experience with a cloud platform, ideally Azure but AWS or GCP also acceptable
- Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases
- Experience working in environments with multiple stakeholders and cross‑team dependencies
- Exposure to AI/ML systems in production (model integration, inference pipelines, data workflows) is highly desirable
- Strong focus on end users of products and a customer‑first mindset
- Strong system design and architectural thinking with the ability to design for reuse and scale
- Strong collaboration and communication skills across engineering, product, and AI disciplines
- An interest in modern AI technologies (LLMs, vector search, inference platforms such as Mistral) and how they are applied in real‑world systems
- An innovative and dynamic approach to problem‑solving, analysis and computational skills
Whats in it for you?
- Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary
- Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus Bank holidays)
- Private medical insurance
- 26 weeks maternity and adoption leave (12 months service required at the qualifying date) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, and 6 weeks fully paid paternity leave
- Free 24/7 virtual GP service, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for you and your family, free access to a range of experts to support your mental well‑being
- Information is a shortened summary; refer to our policies for full details
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