Job Description

We don't think we're exaggerating when we say we have one of the most exciting data sets in the country. The insights we gain help us build scalable, high-performance products using cutting-edge technology, products that give our customers an amazing shopping experience, including our award-winning SmartShop app.

In an inclusive, agile environment, you'll have the space to be curious, experiment, and solve complex real-world challenges. Best of all, you'll see your work in the hands of millions of people across the UK.

As a Senior Android Engineer, you'll play a key role in shaping the future of our mobile platforms. You'll lead the design and delivery of high-quality Android solutions, influence technical direction, mentor engineers, and help establish engineering best practices across teams. Working closely with Product, Design, and Engineering partners, you'll drive innovation and ensure our Android experiences remain scalable, resilient, and customer-focused.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of large-scale Android applications using modern Kotlin-based technologies
• Own complex technical deliveries, driving solutions from discovery and architecture through to implementation and production support
• Define and influence mobile architecture, engineering standards, and technical strategy across multiple products and teams
• Mentor and support engineers, fostering technical growth and a culture of continuous improvement
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Designers, Architects, and Engineers to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions
• Drive engineering excellence through modern software practices, automation, code quality, testing, observability, and CI/CD
• Contribute to platform-level initiatives, shared libraries, and cross-platform capabilities, including Kotlin Multiplatform
• Identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, scalability challenges, and security concerns
• Champion customer experience, accessibility, reliability, and maintainability in all engineering decisions
• Actively contribute to the wider engineering community through knowledge sharing, technical leadership, and innovation

Essential Criteria

• Extensive commercial experience developing complex Android applications using Kotlin, including advanced use of Coroutines, Flows, Retrofit, Hilt, Room, Coil, Navigation Components, and Jetpack libraries
• Experience contributing to or leading adoption of Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) solutions across Android platforms
• Expert understanding of modern Android architecture patterns, including MVVM, Clean Architecture, modularisation, and scalable application design
• Proven track record of leading the end-to-end delivery of mobile products across the full software development lifecycle
• Strong experience designing technical solutions and influencing architectural decisions within large-scale engineering environments
• Deep understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including testing, security, performance optimisation, observability, and CI/CD
• Advanced experience with automated testing frameworks including JUnit, Mockito, Turbine, and UI testing approaches
• Experience mentoring engineers, providing technical leadership, and driving engineering best practices within teams
• Ability to influence technical roadmaps, balancing customer needs, business goals, and long-term platform sustainability
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience collaborating effectively within cross-functional and cross-platform engineering teams
• Demonstrated ability to identify and resolve complex technical challenges while maintaining a focus on quality, scalability, and delivery outcomes

Desirable Criteria

• Strong experience with Jetpack Compose and modern declarative UI development
• Knowledge of backend technologies, APIs, cloud-native architectures, and distributed systems
• Experience building and maintaining shared mobile platforms, SDKs, or reusable engineering capabilities
• Experience working with AI, ML, or intelligent product features
• Active contribution to engineering communities through mentoring, conference speaking, blogging, or open-source projects

What Success Looks Like

• You are recognised as a senior technical leader within your team and broader engineering community
• Teams adopt architecture and engineering practices you've helped define
• Engineers grow through your mentoring and technical guidance
• Mobile applications remain performant, resilient, secure, and scalable for millions of customers
• You help shape the future direction of Android engineering within Sainsbury's Tech

Benefits

• Generous colleague discount across Sainsbury's, Argos, and Habitat
• Competitive holiday allowance
• Private Health Care
• Bonus scheme
• Pension plan
• Flexible / smarter working policy
• Access to special offers on gyms, restaurants, holidays, retail vouchers and more

Work-life balance matters to us. We offer flexibility in how, when, and where you work, combining remote collaboration with the right balance of freedom to support your life outside work.

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety involved. Then you’ll realise this is a modern software engineering environment, because it has to be. We’ve made significant investment in the standards and principles that shape how we work. We iterate, learn, experiment and champion ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to exciting opportunities across everything from AI to reusable tech.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).