Senior Java Engineer - Personalisation

Tesco UK  •  London  •  Hybrid  •  Full-Time  •  Permanent  •  Apply by 15-Oct-2025 About the role

Tesco's Personalised Ranking API Team sits at the heart of the Product Discovery space, powering features like search and recommendation carousels across
tesco.com
and our mobile apps. If you've shopped with us,
you've seen our work.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer (SDE3) to join our collaborative, self-organising team of four engineers.
You'll be responsible for designing and building fast, scalable APIs that serve rich, personalised data experiences to
millions of customers.

Latency is our most critical metric. Our services are highly visible and must respond quickly even as they aggregate and
transform data from internal ML models (trained by Data Science teams) and personalised data sources. You'll collaborate with data science teams,
frontend engineers, and other Product Discovery squads to ensure that the APIs we expose are fast, resilient, and a
pleasure to use.

What is in it for you We’re all about the little helps. That’s why we make sure our Tesco colleague benefits package takes care of you – both in and out of work. Click Here to find out more!   

• Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary 
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus Bank holidays) 
• Private medical insurance 
• 26 weeks maternity and adoption leave (after 1 years’ service) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, we also offer 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave 
• Free 24/7 virtual GP service, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for you and your family, free access to a range of experts to support your mental wellbeing 

You will be responsible for

• Designing and implementing performant APIs using Java
• Working closely with Product to shape requirements and plan delivery
• Collaborating with peers to build features from end to end — from idea to live monitoring
• Ensuring high availability and low latency through thoughtful caching strategies, load testing, and observability
• Using New Relic and Splunk for monitoring, and participating in on-call rotations
• Making critical decisions around data modelling and system architecture using Redis, Kafka, Flink, Beam, and Azure
• Working with Kubernetes to deploy and manage services
• Collaborating with teams across Tesco Technology to build cohesive, customer-centric experiences

You will need You'll need to have

• Extensive experience building and scaling backend APIs using Java
• Solid understanding of Micronaut, RESTful design principles, and microservice architecture
• Deep experience with NoSQL databases (Redis, Kafka, Flink or Beam experience is a plus)
• Experience with distributed systems, and a clear understanding of how to optimise for performance and resilience
• An ownership mindset: you build it, you ship it, you own it - including observability and incident response
• A collaborative approach, and experience working closely with Product, Design, and Data teams
• Familiarity with tools and platforms like Redis, New Relic, Splunk, and Azure
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes for deployment and operations

Nice to have

• Experience with Kafka or other messaging/event systems
• Experience with Beam, Flink or other distributed stream processing systems
• Knowledge of caching strategies and how to balance them with data freshness and performance

About us Our vision at Tesco is to become every customer's favourite way to shop, whether they are at home or out on the move. Our core purpose is ‘Serving our customers, communities and planet a little better every day’. Serving means more than a transactional relationship with our customers. It means acting as a responsible and sustainable business for all stakeholders, for the communities we are part of and for the planet.    We are proud to have an inclusive culture at Tesco where everyone truly feels able to be themselves. At Tesco, we not only celebrate diversity, but recognise the value and opportunity it brings. We're committed to creating a workplace where differences are valued, and make sure that all colleagues are given the same opportunities. We’re proud to have been accredited Disability Confident Leader and we’re committed to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process. For further information on the accessibility support we can offer, please click here.    We’re a big business and we can offer a range of diverse full-time & part-time working patterns across our many business areas, which means that we can find something that works for you.  We work in a more blended pattern - combining office and remote working.  Our offices will continue to be where we connect, collaborate and innovate.  If you are applying internally, please speak to the Hiring Manager about how this can work for you - Everyone is welcome at Tesco.