How Commercial technology team enable products, suppliers and core business entities at Tesco at scale

From climate change to health and diversity, we have built sustainability into our core purpose, strategy, and business plans. We know our business depends on the world around us, and as the UK’s largest retailer we can make a big difference. Tesco has always been a champion for customers, serving millions every day with great value and healthy and increasingly sustainable food. Our commitment to operating responsibly reflects our values, which are the responsibility of everyone at Tesco.

Our commitment to our customers extends beyond our stores and digital channels and into every community we serve – in the UK, Ireland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Hungary. We provide extra support to those that need it through food banks, donation schemes, and community grants.

Andrew Hughes (Product) and I, Prakash Mall (Engineering) lead the Commercial Technology Change team. We design and build the systems and processes that allow our commercial colleagues to source, select and sell the best products for our customers.

We cover the entire lifecycle of products, where we source (suppliers), what we buy (products), where we sell (ranging), where to find on shelf/screen (planogram) through to how we manage the exit of products from stores (stock/waste/price integrity mgmt.).

Delivering this involves multiple engineering products that form part of Tesco’s Retail Platform, built using micro-services, cloud-native and serve at scale. We are a group team and provide solutions for all our markets.

When I joined the team in May 2022, I was truly amazed at the size and scale of what we are building. The impact and value we deliver to the business are exemplary, starting from dynamic pricing, personalized promotions, commodity cost price modelling, packaging waste reduction, and store food donation applications to supporting our supplier partners with the best systems in the industry – all these efforts contributing towards serving our customers, communities, and planet a little better every day.

I am most proud, though, of Tesco’s commitment to the environment by ensuring we minimize waste going to landfill and its use of innovative technology to better use food waste by donating food to charities (83% of food saved goes to charity). To date, our store apps for food waste management have enabled the donation of over a million meals to 3000 plus charities, with each meal of 420 gms.

Andrew Hughes has been at Tesco for over 30 years, working in all parts of our business, and has a rich knowledge of retail that helps us solve real problems for real people. Together we lead a team of talented people with strong product and engineering skills. We enjoy a strong culture of inclusivity and trust. We hire the best, empower our product team and engineers to contribute at their highest potential and provide opportunities to learn and grow at a rapid pace.

As an engineering organisation, we have strong emphasis on open-source tools and technologies. We work on exciting opportunities that simplifies the customer journey, enhances supplier interaction and enable omni-channel with multiple fulfilment options. With Woosh, we enabled 30 mins delivery of fresh products. We deal with exciting engineering scale challenges with millions of API hits across 5 countries and that calls for some real innovation. We use hybrid cloud with deployments across public and private cloud spread out to multiple zones for failover. Our engineering culture encourage ownership, accountability, and teamwork.

While it is all hard, challenging, and exciting work, it is also a lot of fun. We have one of the best campus in Bangalore, London, Hungary and Poland with engineering team spread across these locations. We are hiring for multiple open positions as we seek to accelerate our transformation.

Do you have skills in deep engineering and product development? Do you want to make a difference and build products that will change our world?

The retail Food business is a complex and competitive environment with customers seeking to make the most of their money while also making choices about the health and sustainability of what they buy.?Being the largest retailer in the UK and leading in multiple other countries, Tesco is committed to providing value to customers and making a difference to our planet and communities.

We want great people to join our team who are as passionate as we are – is that you?

Principal Software Dev Engineer - As a Principal Software Development Engineer, you are key in shaping large parts of Tesco’s technical landscape. You contribute to strategic planning, combining business vision and industry best practices to define technical strategy and make decisions. You typically work across multiple teams, setting the standard for engineering excellence and efficient technical design. You are hands-on and guide teams to improve technology across product portfolios, infrastructure and processes.

Software Development Manager SDM - As a SDM, you are responsible to build the most effective empowered full stack team while delivery business value. Your primary focus is to hire, retain and develop Software Development Engineers (SDEs), work with product team to define the scope, work with programme and engineering team(s) - within and other stakeholders - on the design, manage dependency and delivery of high quality product. You are key to ensure we live true to agile principles and follow good engineering disciplines.

Software Dev Engineer III - You are the creative minds developing the software applications that make life easier for customers and deliver value to the business. You are responsible for the entire development and support process for a software programme.

Software Dev Engineer II - You are an important member of the team, you are curious and innovative. You bring your experience on build/ support to life, working with others in the team and help each other be the better self.

Pls reach out for any further conversation.

Reach out to Sumithra KR for details on open positions and if you want to explore.