Job Specifications
About The Role
The Partnership is the UK’s most successful omnichannel retailer which includes two of the UK’s most loved department store and grocery brands with annual sales revenues in excess of £12B. The Shared Functions area of the Partnership covers a broad range of business capabilities across the back office (Finance, HR, Property, Communication), the shared digital workplace environment (e.g. productivity and collaboration tools), and the Partnership’s new Build to Rent line of business. The technology supporting the Shared Functions area is a blend of commercially available third-party platforms (across SaaS, PaaS and vendor-hosted environment), and bespoke in-house systems, all interconnected through integrations with other areas of the business. These systems must not only be highly resilient but also adaptable, enabling us to enhance operational efficiency and respond to evolving business needs. Change to systems in this part of the business is currently delivered through projects and implemented though 3rd party development teams and internal configuration teams. There are 5 teams across this area who deliver change and support the systems. We are hiring for an engineering leader to help modernise and simplify our tech stack, with a specific focus on how we integrate our applications, to enable both business agility and productivity, as well as improve system maintainability. This will include supporting & advising on how we can enable our desired strategic shift to move away from project based ways of working in order to establish Product teams and agile practices as well as change how we work with our suppliers. As the Principal Engineer for Shared Functions, you will report into the Architecture & Engineering Lead for Shared Functions.
Find out more about being a Software Engineer in the Partnership, and the technology we use.
Contract type - This position is a permanent contract.
Flexible Working: This is a hybrid working role, therefore your time will primarily be split between working from home (in the UK) and London Head Office. However, there will also be an expectation to visit other locations as the need arises.
Most leaders in this part of the business aim for a day a week in the office, and occasionally business needs may require more frequent attendance. Our offices are open five days a week for those who prefer to work from the office more regularly.
Key Responsibilities:
You will play a pivotal role in aligning the engineering strategy and roadmap for the Partnership’s Shared Functions areas with the overarching business objectives. Your influence will extend to key decisions that shape the operation of the Partnership’s Shared Functions systems and guide how engineering drives change across this complex business area.
This will involve influencing how work is managed—whether agile, waterfall, or hybrid— including the effectiveness and measurement of teams. This includes ensuring that engineering practices align with the broader Partnership engineering strategy and influencing team structure, balance, and resource models by providing key input on ways of working and team maturity to deliver optimal engineering capabilities.
To do this you will collaborate closely with key stakeholders such as Product Leads/Business Owners, Delivery and Operations Managers, Infrastructure Leads and Enterprise & Solution Architects as well as Senior Staff Engineers, specialist engineering teams and 3rd Parties. You will also work closely with other Principal Engineers in JLP who may be responsible for other business areas or for deep engineering specialisms such as cloud or data.
Successful candidates will have a passion for using technology to deliver outstanding and innovative software solutions, and will have a track record of working with teams delivering complex, performant, secure, high quality software.
Essential skills/experience you’ll need:
Strong engineering background with real world experience of modern software engineering techniques such as Continuous Delivery and ideally experience of using strategic patterns of Domain Driven Design.
Experience of the technical implementation and integration of package solutions (such as SaaS) into large complex environments with a mixture of modern and heritage technology.
Experience in senior leadership role, working with senior stakeholders and influencing engineering decisions in a complex environment (including guardrails and standards)
Knowledge/experience of working with different architectural styles (e.g. monolith, service based, microservices) and integration patterns when working with different platforms (broker models, RESTful, streams, event based).
Knowledge/experience of techniques used to increase resilience and/or scalability of systems.
Experience of applying techniques from Lean and Systems Thinking.
Worked with 3rd Party development suppliers across a range of different commercial constructs
Desirable Skills/experience Y
About the Company
Working in Partnership for a happier world.
Our Partnership is an ongoing experiment to find happier, more trusted ways of doing business, for the benefit of us all. We work together to create a successful business and a fairer, more sustainable future for Partners, customers, suppliers and communities.
Our Partnership is owned entirely in trust by Partners which means we are more than employees; we share knowledge, power and profit.
Our Purpose inspires our principles, drives our decisions and acts as our guide.
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