TESCO PLC Software Development Engineer - Data Engineering

About the Tesco Technology - Forecasting team

In Demand forecasting, we build products that powers the engine of Supply Chain that makes sure customers get what products they need when they walk into a Tesco Store or shop through other channels. We influence product availability through advanced forecasting and right ordering. Its challenging since it needs to be done whilst keeping waste reduction and optimal stock holding. This helps keep our operational costs in control and helps the bottom line. The more we save, the more we can pass on to our customers w.r.t the right price. It’s fun since we are building better capabilities on newer platforms.

This involves a lot of learning since we are transforming our forecasting intelligence to algorithms on big data platforms. We crunch a large volume of history, react to recent trends, promotional events, turn demands into the right kind of orders for supplier and store. The nature of our products lends themselves to real time data inputs, machine learning and applied statistics, safely allowing us to say it’s a fantastic problem space to work in and help solve. We take responsibility for the software through its entire lifecycle. We practice continuous integration and delivery and support our code through to production and beyond.

Responsibilities:

Whilst specific responsibilities will be dependent upon the changing needs of the Tesco business, the following provides an overview of the role’s key responsibilities and measures:

• Consistently deliver against the product and engineering backlogs.


• Support your and your team’s code all the way to production. Lead and evangelize the use of Monitoring & Alerting tooling ( Splunk ) in order to “do production right”.


• Adhere to the processes, designs and systems your teams have agreed to.


• Contribute to the definition of features for services owned by your team.


• Continuously improve yourself and your team by suggesting and helping implement new Engineering processes and practices.


• Customer focus. You find the right balance between outcome delivery and technical excellence.


• Be a technical authority on one or more technical areas of your team, someone the rest of the team turn to for engineering advice or guidance.


• Lead on team architecture and design discussions. Manage technical discussions with stakeholders beyond your team


• Lead in the setting of coding standards, testing standards and operational best practices


• Mentor less experienced developers


• Effectively communicate your and your team’s progress to your team members, your Manager and wider Tesco colleagues.

Skills:

• Bigdata Hadoop as your main area of expertise;


• Spark , Spark SQL;


• PySpark or Scala;


• Hive (HiveLLAP);


• Hbase, Phoenix and other SQL and NoSQL (Druid, Kylin would be added advantage);


• Hands on with data ingestion and transformation (Sqoop/Nifi/Flume/kafka, consuming APIs;


• Understanding of how to efficiently structure data on HDFS (columnar stores, compression, partitions);


• Good experience with productionizing algorithms;


• Design/Develop Batch and Streaming Framework, when to use which;


• Ability to give design for Streaming Applications;


• Ability to turn a business problem into an algorithmic formulation (incl. break down into multiple parts if necessary);


• Understanding Of ML Techniques;


• Enabling build of data platform capabilities – BackTesting, disaster recovery, Querying engine for analysts etc.

Experience

• 3+ years of commercial software development experience and 3+ years in big data platform.


• Problem solving, analysis and computational skills. You are comfortable designing systems and reasoning about them. When tackling problems, you take a thorough and logical approach to solving them and you retain ownership through to resolution.


• Designing and developing systems for high availability and scalability.


• Experience working with data, algorithms and setting up solid data platform capabilities.


• Depth of professional software engineering experience and best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations


• Experience of running and supporting software in production.