Job Description

Tesco Hungary • Hybrid • Full-Time • Working hours 40 • Apply by 31-Dec-2026 About the role 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 standards for engineering excellence and efficient technical design. You are hands-on and guide teams to improve technology across product portfolios, infrastructure, and processes. As a senior technical expert, you are a thought leader for large and complex areas. You set technical direction to translate strategy into action, making a significant impact on the organisation. You own the design, implementation, and delivery of software that shapes products and technologies. You use your depth of skill and experience to enable multiple teams around you to deliver excellent software quickly. What is in it for you Tesco is a diverse and exciting employer, dedicated to being #aplacetogeton, providing career-defining opportunities to all of our colleagues. If you chose to join our business, we will provide you with:

• Permanent contract from the go – as a sign of our trust in your abilities
• Yearly salary bonus – based on both individual and business performance
• Car allowance
• Extensive private healthcare - complex care package including a wide range of specialists, medical services, and free flu vaccination
• Cafeteria
• Relocation Help - professional service to secure relevant working permits and other necessary documents
• Learning opportunities - certified technical training and learning platforms like Udemy, Pluralsight, and O'Reilly
• Referral Bonus
• Learning culture and excellent opportunities to develop your career within your chosen field or something altogether new
• Varied and exciting projects to play a part in – there is always something new and exciting in the pipeline

If that sounds exciting, then we'd love to hear from you. You will be responsible for

• Define, design, and deliver end-to-end technical solutions based on high-level problems, ensuring organisation wide adoption.
• Act as a senior technical authority across multiple domains, guiding architecture, resolving complex issues, and influencing engineering strategy.
• Lead large programmes and major technical decisions (build vs buy, deprecation, refactoring, roadmap trade-offs).
• Provide hands-on technical leadership through high impact design and critical path coding.
• Set strategic design direction for key areas with a focus on security, scalability, extensibility, and reusability.
• Drive and evolve Tesco’s Inner Source Platform and share engineering practices.
• Mentor engineers across teams, running knowledge transfer, reviews, and coaching to raise technical quality.
• Strengthen organisational capability through hiring, assessments, and raising the technical bar.
• Work with Data Scientists and Analysts to uncover emerging loss vectors, co-develop detection logic, and turn insights into actionable technical solutions. Preferably have a track record of using data engineering, data science, rules etc. based fraud/loss prevention and delivering value
• Continuously evolve LP capabilities in a rapidly changing risk landscape, integrating new data sources, technologies, and modelling approaches. Preferably have experience of thinking from the first principles on fraud/LPS and identifying the north start in strategy (for e.g. all inputs signals in stores, online) whilst picking the right ones in a sequence
• Design scalable, real-time detection and prevention systems embedded across key retail processes (stores, online, supply chain, checkout, operations).
• Prototype and validate new approaches through fast PoCs, converting innovative ideas into production ready capabilities that materially reduce shrink.
• Collaborate with a wide network of teams and domains (store operations, supply chain, finance, online, transport, fraud, shrink, etc…) to embed LP as a cross-cutting concern across the entire retail ecosystem. Good at understanding new domains, ideas, data sources quickly and influence the different stakeholders in technology, business on the north star and sequence, PoCs etc. at different time horizons

You will need Experience

• Demonstrated experience designing, developing and running whole system landscapes.
• Experience acting as a technical authority across multiple domains and multiple technologies.
• Experience proposing architectural patterns for adoption by an organisation.
• Experience guiding large programmes of work.
• Experience driving the adoption of inner sourcing initiatives.
• Experience collaborating with Data Scientists and Analysts to identify emerging loss vectors and shape detection logic.
• Experience designing real-time detection and prevention systems using event driven architectures
• Experience processing largescale, high-volume data sets and identifying rare, high impact anomalies (“needle in the haystack” problems)

Skills

• Programming
• System Design
• Development Practice
• Infrastructure
• Software Security
• Operations and Maintenance
• Core Technology
• Development Lifecycle
• Product Methodologies
• Retail Technology Awareness
• Communication & Influencing
• Data Analytics & Insights
• Strategic Thinking & Problem Solving
• Finance & Procurement
• Curiosity & Learning
• Embracing and Enabling Change About us Tesco Business Solution and Tesco Technology were established in Budapest in 2019, supporting the Tesco retail business in Central Europe and the Tesco Group. TBST and Tesco Technology are part of our global business services and technology organisations within Tesco. In the UK, Ireland, India, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic we operate to offer great value to our customers every day. In Budapest, our Technology hub currently employs more than 200 – and a growing number – of highly trained software engineers and managers who are implementing global software development projects across fulfilment, supplier and product management, online and in-store loss prevention, and our online grocery sites. Our goal is to bring significant changes to the market by using the latest technologies. We are focusing on a large variety of modern technologies from the backend space and frontend to UX, UI and even data science and engineering. We are aiming to drive business value through innovation and to create an organization that fundamentally transforms the retail environment. We put accountability and ownership on the individuals and their teams in order to run a horizontal organization where teamwork is extremely important. With an end-to-end approach, we offer our colleagues opportunities for self-development and career growth. Our colleagues are the key to our success at Tesco. We foster an environment of openness and collaboration. We draw from the diversity, knowledge and experience of our colleagues. It is all about equal opportunities, no matter who you are, or where you come from, you can get on at Tesco. Our teams consist of individuals who can truly make a difference. Focusing on building a world-class business services centre alongside cutting-edge technology capability, they are working towards our goal of serving our customers and colleagues a little better every day. We are expanding our operations locally and we are looking for the best talent.