Job Description

Tesco UK o Welwyn Garden City o Hybrid o Full-Time o Permanent o Apply by 26-Nov-2025
About the role



Tesco's Personalised Ranking API Team sits at the heart of the Product Discovery space, powering features like search and recommendation carousels across tesco.com and our mobile apps. If you've shopped with us, you've seen our work.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer (SDE3) to join our collaborative, self-organising team off our engineers.

You'll be responsible for designing and building fast, scalable APIs that serve rich, personalised data experiences to
millions of customers.

Latency is our most critical metric. Our services are highly visible and must respond quickly even as they aggregate and
transform data from internal ML models (Trained by Data Science teams) and personalised data sources.

You'll collaborate with data science teams, frontend engineers, and other Product Discovery squads to ensure that the APIs we expose are fast, resilient, and a pleasure to use.
What is in it for you
We're all about the little helps. That's why we make sure our Tesco colleague benefits package takes care of you - both in and out of work.

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 (after 1 years' service) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, we also offer 4 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 wellbeing You will be responsible for
Designing and implementing performant APIs using Java
Working closely with Product to shape requirements and plan delivery
Collaborating with peers to build features from end-to-end - from idea to live monitoring
Ensuring high availability and low latency through thoughtful caching strategies, load testing, andobservability
Using New Relic and Splunk for monitoring, and participating in on-call rotations
Making critical decisions around data modelling and system architecture using Redis, Kafka, Flink,Beam and Azure
Working with Kubernetes to deploy and manage services
Collaborating with teams across Tesco Technology to build cohesive, customer-centric experiences
You will need

You'll need to have

Extensive experience building and scaling backend APIs using Java
Solid understanding of Micronaut, RESTful design principles, and microservice architecture
Deep experience with NoSQL databases (Redis, Kafka, Flink or Beam experience is a plus)
Experience with distributed systems, and a clear understanding of how to optimise forperformance and resilience
An ownership mindset: you build it, you ship it, you own it - including observability and incidentresponse
A collaborative approach, and experience working closely with Product, Design, and Data teams
Familiarity with tools and platforms like Redis, New Relic, Splunk,

Nice to have

Experience with Kafka or other messaging/event systems
Experience with Beam, Flink or other distributed stream processing systems
Knowledge of caching strategies and how to balance them with data freshness and performance
About us
Our vision at Tesco is to become every customer's favourite way to shop, whether they are at home or out on the move. Our core purpose is 'Serving our customers, communities and planet a little better every day'. Serving means more than a transactional relationship with our customers. It means acting as a responsible and sustainable business for all stakeholders, for the communities we are part of and for the planet.

We are proud to have an inclusive culture at Tesco where everyone truly feels able to be themselves. At Tesco, we not only celebrate diversity, but recognise the value and opportunity it brings. We're committed to creating a workplace where differences are valued, and make sure that all colleagues are given the same opportunities. We're proud to have been accredited Disability Confident Leader and we're committed to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process.

We're a big business and we can offer a range of diverse full-time & part-time working patterns across our many business areas, which means that we can find something that works for you. We work in a more blended pattern - combining office and remote working. Our offices will continue to be where we connect, collaborate and innovate. If you are applying internally, please speak to the Hiring Manager about how this can work for you - Everyone is welcome at Tesco.