Staff Data Engineer - Data Channels
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: London Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1M 6HA
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Sainsbury's Tech
Closing date: 11 September 2026
Requisition ID: 400072258
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 to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety involved. Then you’ll realise this is a modern software engineering environment, because it has to be. We’ve made significant investment in the standards and principles that shape how we work. We iterate, learn, experiment and champion ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to exciting opportunities across everything from AI to reusable tech.
Why Join Us?
At Sainsbury's Tech, you'll be part of a business operating at truly extraordinary scale. From insights generated by over 10 million Nectar customers to powering one of the UK's largest retail and digital ecosystems, our technology teams solve complex challenges that impact millions of customers every day.
Our modern engineering landscape spans AWS, Azure and GCP, with thousands of cloud-native services, event-driven architectures powered by Kafka, and data platforms that support critical business decisions across retail, digital, supply chain and customer experience.
As a Staff Engineer - Data Engineering, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the technical direction of our data platforms and products. You'll work across multiple teams and domains, helping engineers deliver scalable, reliable and secure data solutions while driving engineering excellence and influencing outcomes that extend beyond individual squads.
About the Role
This is a highly influential technical leadership role where you'll partner closely with Engineering Managers, Principal Engineers, Product teams and business stakeholders to solve complex data engineering challenges at enterprise scale.
You'll provide technical leadership across multiple squads, define reusable engineering patterns, improve standards and guide the design and delivery of modern data solutions spanning batch, streaming and event-driven architectures.
You'll be equally comfortable shaping long-term technical direction, reviewing architecture, coaching engineers and getting involved in critical delivery initiatives where your expertise can make the greatest impact.
What You'll Be Doing
- Lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure and resilient data platforms, pipelines and services.
- Define technical direction across multiple teams, ensuring consistency, simplification and long-term maintainability.
- Drive architecture and design reviews for complex data engineering initiatives.
- Establish and evolve engineering standards, patterns and best practices across data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, testing, monitoring and data quality.
- Coach and mentor Engineers and Senior Engineers through design reviews, pairing, code reviews and technical leadership.
- Collaborate with Product, Architecture, Security, Governance, BI and Data & Analytics teams to deliver coherent and commercially effective solutions.
- Support planning and delivery processes by identifying technical dependencies, risks, non-functional requirements and implementation approaches.
- Champion operational excellence through observability, monitoring, alerting, incident learning and continuous improvement.
- Ensure data governance, security, GDPR and PII considerations are embedded into solution design from the outset.
Essential Criteria
- Significant experience designing, building and operating modern data platforms and data engineering solutions at scale.
- Strong expertise in batch, streaming and event-driven architectures, including hands-on experience with Kafka and real-time data processing technologies.
- Deep understanding of software engineering best practices including architecture, testing strategies, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability and DevSecOps.
- Strong experience working with modern cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP, including cloud-native data services.
- Proven experience with data engineering technologies such as Snowflake, SQL, Python, dbt and orchestration frameworks.
- Strong knowledge of data modelling, data quality, lineage, metadata management, reconciliation and data governance.
- Experience implementing secure data solutions, including GDPR, PII handling, role-based access controls and audit requirements.
- Ability to evaluate and communicate technical trade-offs across cost, scalability, performance, resilience and delivery risk.
- Demonstrated experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
- Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Proven track record of coaching and developing engineers while raising engineering standards across teams.
- Passion for continuous improvement and driving pragmatic, customer-focused engineering outcomes.
Desirable Skills
- Experience within large-scale retail, eCommerce or customer-focused digital organisations.
- Knowledge of customer data platforms, data products, personalisation and identity solutions.
- Experience supporting AI, analytics or machine learning data platforms.
- Familiarity with modern BI and reporting ecosystems.
- Experience working within highly distributed, microservices-based architectures.
What You'll Gain
This role offers an exceptional opportunity to broaden your impact across one of the UK's largest technology estates. You'll work on complex, high-value technical challenges while influencing engineering strategy, mentoring talented engineers and helping shape the future of data engineering at Sainsbury's Tech.
For those looking to continue their technical leadership journey, this role provides a strong pathway towards Principal Engineer, with increasing influence across technology strategy, organisational design and enterprise-wide engineering outcomes.
What's in it for You?
- Hybrid and flexible working
- Competitive salary and annual bonus
- Pension scheme
- Private healthcare
- Generous holiday allowance
- Colleague discount across Sainsbury's, Argos and Habitat
- Wellbeing support and lifestyle benefits
- Discounts on gym memberships, restaurants, travel and retail offers
- Career development and learning opportunities within one of the UK's most recognised retail brands
Help shape the future of data engineering at Sainsbury's Tech and build technology that serves millions of customers every day.
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 save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. 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 20% of salary (which may vary for Nectar360), depending on how we perform. Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary 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).
