What’s the role about?

As the UK’s most successful omni-channel retailer, E-Commerce is a key part of Our Business - we run two of the busiest websites in the UK, driving a significant proportion of our sales. Our Engineering practice includes 60+ teams, working on everything from Cloud Platforms to Mobile Apps, from E-Commerce functionality to Machine Learning.

Our Engineers work collaboratively and share knowledge, and learning is extremely important to us. We support our Engineers to continuously improve their skills and keep abreast of the latest technologies.

Find out more about being a Software Engineer in the Partnership, and the technology we use.

What you’ll be doing?

This is an opportunity to work as a Platform Engineer within a cross-functional Agile development team. You will be working collaboratively with other highly skilled Engineers creating and improving our cloud-based platforms that are used by the delivery teams building complex, mission-critical applications. The team takes a “paved road” approach, a term coined by Netflix to provide features that benefit the many Engineers that utilise these platforms, by evolving its capabilities and tailoring them to both Our Business and Engineering needs.

Ideal candidates will have good Software Engineering skills with a track record of working in teams delivering flexible cloud-based infrastructure solutions that are scalable, secure and performant. Successful candidates will have passion for using technology to deliver outstanding and innovative solutions.

What you’ll already have:

• Experience working with one or both of Google Cloud Platform (johnlewis.com) or Amazon Web Services (waitrose.com), and in particular those cloud services which are used to run Microservices at scale.

• Managing infrastructure as code, with a Software Engineering mindset.

• Comfortable with the use of Docker & Kubernetes.

• Use of languages such as Python or Golang to automate configuration and extend platform services.

• Building distributed systems for reliability and security.

• Implementing cloud-native solutions to provide observability for the platform and the services that run within it.

• Familiarity in the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery practice, and experience of using supporting tools to help it work effectively for many Engineers.

What else you could bring:

• Awareness with Agile development methods such as Scrum or Kanban.

• Specific use of some of the following languages and tools is very helpful:

  • Google Kubernetes Engine or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

  • Terraform

  • Grafana & Prometheus

  • Elastic & Kibana 

  • Gitlab CI

Where will you be working?:

We have opportunities at both our John Lewis Head Office in London Victoria, and Waitrose Head Office in Bracknell. Whilst you will have an office base - we promote a blended approach to working location. In order to maximise the benefits of remote and team working, you will be able to work from either our offices or from a remote location (as long as it is within the UK).  

We'll expect flexibility and will on occasions require you to be in the office. But for this role, it would be reasonable to plan on the basis of a 60/40 remote/office split.  In practice, we aim to maximise flexibility and these decisions will mostly be made locally within your team.