Head of Engineering - Nectar360
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: London Store Support Centre, London, EC1M 6HA
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Sainsbury's Tech
Closing date: 15 September 2025
Requisition ID: 400015965
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 for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you’ll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We’ve made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.
Why join us
As the Head of Engineering, you'll be a trusted voice for technology and innovation within our business community. With over 2000 locations, and 100,000 + colleagues, you will engage and manage stakeholders, teams, and suppliers to deliver exceptional experiences for our customers and colleagues. As a trusted leader of leaders, you will foster a high-performance, inclusive culture, ensuring your teams operate in an empowered and professional environment. With a focus on people leadership, engagement, and communication, you will lead the evolution of our teams towards agile ways of working, drive delivery excellence, and champion technical excellence.
About the Team & your role
As part of Nectar360, a leader in loyalty and customer insight, we harness the power of Sainsbury’s rich first-party data and deep customer understanding to deliver targeted media campaigns across both physical and digital touchpoints — from in-store screens and point-of-sale to online display, sponsored product listings, and personalised emails.
As a technical authority, the Head of Engineering is expected to set and uphold high engineering standards across architecture, design, development, and operations. You will lead the adoption of scalable, secure, and resilient technology solutions, ensuring alignment with Sainsbury’s Tech strategy and North Star.
You will champion modern engineering practices including CI/CD, DevSecOps, cloud-native development, and platform thinking, while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Your role includes driving technical decision-making, managing technical debt, and ensuring the engineering teams are equipped to deliver robust, performant, and maintainable systems. You will work closely with architects and principal engineers to shape the technology roadmap and ensure engineering teams are empowered to innovate and deliver with autonomy and accountability.
What you'll do
- Building strong relationships with business and tech leaders, you will be the trusted voice for technology, innovation, and modern agile ways of working within your respective business community.
- You'll lead and mentor teams of engineers to deliver unique and differentiating products, fostering a culture of innovation and high technical standards.
- You will be accountable for the processes and path to production and deployment of change, ensuring that all new and enhanced products and platforms are released seamlessly and in line with business change plans.
- As a leader, you will build strong relationships, drive continuous improvement, and champion the concept of expert, stable, and integrated teams.
- Your success will be measured by the quality of relationships established, successful alignment of product priorities and outcomes, technical excellence demonstrated, and the delivery of customer value and business outcomes at pace.
Who you are
- You're a strategic leader who knows how to build great relationships across a business.
- With your deep understanding of the technology landscape, you play a pivotal role in ensuring the delivery of unique and differentiating products to millions of customers.
- Leading and mentoring teams of engineers, you champion agile ways of working, foster a culture of innovation, and continuously strive for improved outcomes and value.
- Your ability to make sound judgments, manage budgets, and make data-driven decisions allows you to drive maximum efficiency and effectiveness within your teams and deliver customer value at pace.
- With your passion for technology, and results-oriented mindset, you empower your teams to perform at their best and deliver high-quality solutions that align with the overall business strategy.
- You are a visionary leader who continuously stays relevant in the ever-changing technology landscape, and you make decisive decisions to drive success.
- As a plus you will have experience within Retail or Adtech organisations.
Essential Criteria
- Proven experience leading large-scale engineering teams across multiple disciplines (e.g., software, infrastructure, DevOps).
- Deep understanding of modern engineering practices including CI/CD and platform architecture.
- Experience in application development and maintenance, including integration of build vs. buy solutions.
- Hands on technical background, with a strong grasp of system designs, CI/CD, scalability, performance optimization, and service resilience.
- Ability to drive agile transformation and embed lean methodologies across teams.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to engage and influence senior stakeholders across technology, product, and operations.
A plus if you have:
- Experience managing multi-million pound budgets and driving value through strategic investment decisions.
- Skilled in supplier and contract management, including renewals and negotiations.
- Familiarity with planning cycles and operational readiness for seasonal retail peaks.
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 get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. 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 65% of salary, depending on how we perform (in cash and shares).
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional 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, pay 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. You'll also receive a company car cash allowance unless you are going to travel 10,000 business miles in your role, then you'll be able to choose a car. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.
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).
