Python Developer

Senior Software Engineer (SDE3) - Data & Intelligence Platform

Supply Chain Tesco Technology

The role

You'll be a core engineer on the data and intelligence layer that connects Tesco's supply chain forecasting outputs to the people and systems that act on them. The platform sits at the intersection of data engineering, applied ML, and developer infrastructure - you'll work across all three, owning problems end to end.

This isn't a role where you'll spend your days in a narrow lane. The work is genuinely varied: one week you're designing a data API, the next you're improving retrieval quality in a RAG pipeline, the next you're working with infrastructure to get a service into production. We're looking for someone who finds that energising rather than uncomfortable.

What you'll work on

Data platform - a high-performance service that brings together multiple data sources - analytical, caching, vector, and object stores - behind a clean typed API. Supply chain data is high-volume and time-sensitive; getting the data layer right underpins everything else the platform does.

Intelligence layer - we work closely with forecasting teams across the business who produce demand signals, predictions, and recommendations. Our job is to make that intelligence accessible, actionable, and explainable - surfacing it through well-designed APIs, keeping it fresh, and ensuring the right data reaches the right place at the right time.

LLM integration - a conversational and tool-calling layer that gives supply chain teams natural language access to platform data and forecasts. You'll work on retrieval quality, tool design, prompt architecture, and streaming response pipelines. This is a relatively new area for us and there's genuine room to shape how it evolves.

What we're looking for

• Takes ownership. When something is broken or missing, you fix it, you don't wait to be asked
• Is comfortable with ambiguity. Not every problem will have a clear spec, you can navigate that without needing handholding
• Writes code other engineers want to work with readable, tested, with the complexity in the right places
• Has worked across backend services and data systems in production, and has the scars to show for it
• Can pick up new technology without being precious about what they already know

Technically, you're strong in TypeScript and Python (or willingness to learn quickly), you've built or operated data-intensive backend services, and you have some experience with LLM APIs or retrieval systems - enough to be productive quickly, even if you haven't done it at scale before.

Kubernetes and cloud-native deployment experience is useful. So is supply chain or forecasting domain knowledge. Neither is required.

The work is meaningful

The platform influences ordering decisions across thousands of stores. When it works well, products are on shelf. When it doesn't, they aren't. That directness of impact is something most engineering roles don't offer.

Nice to have

• Experience contributing to shared frontend/backend or developer platform infrastructure
• Infrastructure as code - Helm, Kubernetes manifests, CI/CD pipeline design
• Supply chain, replenishment, or demand forecasting domain familiarity