Central Digital Operations Lead
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: Coventry Store Support Centre - Ansty Park and Home, Coventry, CV7 9RD
Contract type: Secondment
Business area: Retail
Closing date: 12 August 2025
Requisition ID: 400011409
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. As the link between sellers and buyers, retail and head office, our retail operations team is the cog that keeps things running. With teams focused on store facing, labour, transformation, online, delivery and contact centre work, we touch almost every part of the business. It’s an incredibly fast-paced environment where you need to pivot not just daily, but often hourly. So while we plan all we can, it’s vital that we all think outside our job descriptions and look to optimise and improve how we do everything. There’s also a real team ethos. After all, it’s people like you who are going to truly transform this part of the business.
In a nutshell
You will play a role in centrally co-ordinating our Groceries Online propositions by ensuring that the relevant teams have the right process, labour standards, and equipment for the job. The day-to-day activities of the role may vary dependent on the proposition that you are working on e.g., Planning, Communications and Insight, Operating Model improvements, P&L co-ordination. You will work closely with and influence a range of stakeholders to ensure we are delivering excellence in operations and leading the frontline with store teams to continually evolve and improve the customer experience.
You will act as a Subject Matter Expert and represent Groceries Online in the relevant change forums, ensuring that Transformation, Change and Product teams deliver solution with minimal impact to the operation.
What you need to do
- Maintain procedural and labour documentation for work streams as and when identified and updated.
- Support in the maintenance and updating of relevant systems e.g., ILS, DOP, and Our Sainsbury’s.
- Ensure all relevant risk assessments because of any process or procedural changes are updated to required time scales.
- Work with the relevant teams to deliver against targets as well as planning for and delivering growth and change, enabling sales.
- Support, coach, train and advise retail operations both reactively and proactively; ensuring our customers receive a market leading experience.
- Ensure our propositions follow all safe and legal processes, creating a safe working environment.
- Engage, plans and manage key events and trading periods such as Christmas, Easter and summer trading.
- Support in new store openings, ensuring that teams are set up to deliver operational KPIs.
- Management of user Acceptance Testing for all Groceries Online store facing system changes
- Co-ordinate ad-hoc requests from Senior management.
- Work closely with other operational, trading and retail functions to support the delivery of key SLAs and performance measures, including understanding and communication of where improvement is required.
- Occasional weekend working to support timely resolution of queries
What you need to know
- Subject matter expert on all aspects of Groceries Online operational process, policies, and standards,
- Familiarity and experience with Groceries store-facing systems
- Proficient with PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook, Co-Pilot
- Has a thorough understanding of the business performance and ensures colleagues understand the business impact of their decisions.
What you need to show
- Clearly demonstrates a good eye for detail and can identify and realise opportunities to improve the service provided by the team
- Strong appreciation for the dynamic retail environment and an ability to work at pace
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills across all levels of management
- Ability to achieve deadlines and targets to timescale
- Skill to adapt workload and timescales at short notice
- Capability to understand issues and proactively prioritise and manage multiple tasks
- Capacity to work as a self-directed individual, planning and prioritising workload with minimal supervision
What decisions I can make
All decisions relevant to the role as applicable
Resources available to me
Support from Central and Field Online teams
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 10% of salary, 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. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, 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).
