Why join us
Joining Sainsbury's Tech means becoming part of an inclusive and driven team that is passionate about creating innovative solutions. As an Engineering Manager, you will play a pivotal role in leading and coaching talented engineering teams, driving the delivery of impactful solutions that drive efficiency and enhance performance across the business. With a focus on continuous improvement, you will have the opportunity to shape a world-class engineering function and contribute to the development of cutting-edge processes and technologies. At Sainsbury's, we value collaboration, diversity, and inclusivity, and offer a supportive and inspiring environment where you can make a purposeful contribution. Join us to be a part of an organisation that fosters technical excellence and embraces the power of diversity to shape the technology landscape of a leading UK retailer.
About the Team
You'll lead a multi-skilled engineering team at Sainsbury’s, where we lead the development and management of our new Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning platform.
What you'll do
- Own and evolve a newly built ML Ops platform on Microsoft Azure, supporting the full ML lifecycle—from data sourcing & feature engineering to training, deployment, and real-time serving.
- Architect scalable, secure, and cost-effective solutions, making key build vs. buy decisions to maximise business impact.
- Drive innovation, delivering new AI/ML capabilities such as graph neural networks and LLM Ops.
- Oversee the migration & modernisation of existing ML models into a unified strategic stack.
- Enable multiple cross-functional teams of data scientists and ML engineers, supporting AI-driven automation across the business —from personalisation to logistics optimisation.
- Own the end-to-end delivery and operations of the platform, balancing feature development with production stability.
- Collaborate with Product teams to define and prioritise AI/ML capabilities, ensuring delivery at pace and to a high standard.
- Build a brand-new high-performing engineering team, hiring diverse talent while leveraging third-party resources where needed.
- Define the technical vision for AI & ML Engineering at Sainsbury’s, embedding best practices across the organisation.
- Champion agile/lean delivery, oversee budgets, and manage service support and SLAs.
Who you are
- A passionate and experienced leader with a deep understanding of the role AI & ML plays in retail success.
- A strategic technical expert with hands-on experience in ML Engineering & DevOps, delivering and operating large-scale platforms.
- Skilled in cloud architecture (Azure or AWS a plus), data pipelines, stream processing, and real-time analytics.
- A people-first leader who can hire, develop, and retain top talent while fostering an inclusive and high-performing culture.
- A champion of modern engineering practices, bringing cutting-edge tools and methodologies to improve team efficiency and innovation.
- A results-driven problem solver with strong financial acumen, ensuring investments deliver maximum value.
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