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 of package solutions into complex environments.
• Experience in senior leadership role, leading across multiple teams, working with senior stakeholders and influencing multi-million pound investments in engineering
• Knowledge/experience of working with different architectural styles (e.g. microservices, service based,) and integration patterns when working with different platforms (RESTful, streams, event based, broker models).
• Knowledge/experience of techniques used to improve the resilience, performance, security and evolvability of complex systems.
• Experience of applying techniques from Lean and Systems Thinking.

DESIRABLE SKILLS/EXPERIENCE YOU MAY HAVE

• ECommerce or Retail experience
• Working with legacy systems
• Will have been a hands-on software engineer for part of their career.
• Engineering management role, working across multiple teams or architecture role working across a large part of an enterprise.

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Partnership is the UK’s most successful omni-channel retailer which includes two of the UKs most loved department store and grocery brands with annual sales revenues in excess of £12B. Our Engineering practice includes 80+ teams, working on everything from Cloud Platforms to Mobile Apps, from E-Commerce functionality to Machine Learning. Our Engineers work collaboratively and share knowledge, and learning is extremely important to us. We support our Engineers to continuously improve their skills and keep abreast of the latest technologies. John Lewis E-Commerce & Digital is responsible for delivering a market leading digital customer experience for our web and mobile apps customers, as well as the omnichannel services supporting assisted service in stores and contact centres. In the fast paced environment of retail, where over 50% of our revenue is through digital channels, technology is critical to the business. The technology supporting John Lewis E-Commerce & Digital is a domain-driven microservice architecture hosted on an award winning digital platform, composable SaaS (for our non-differentiating needs) and a handful of legacy applications we are actively modernising, all integrated with each other and other areas of the business. These systems must be highly available, resilient, performant, secure, adaptable and scalable, enabling us to serve our customers at all times and respond quickly to evolving customer and business needs

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• As a Principal Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in aligning the engineering strategy and roadmap for John Lewis E-Commerce & Digital with the overarching business objectives. Your influence will extend to key decisions that shape the operation of John Lewis E-Commerce & Digital services 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.
• A key objective of the role is to revisit some of our first generation microservices and remaining legacy tech in this area, as well as to extend our digital tech into our stores.
• To do this you will collaborate closely with key stakeholders such as Product Leads, Delivery and Operations Managers, Infrastructure Leads and Enterprise Architects as well as Senior Staff Engineers and specialist engineering teams. You will also work closely with other Principal Engineers 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, high quality software.