Principal Software Engineer - Retail Technology

Internal use only - Grade E

About us.

We’re the team behind digital retailer Very.

Our purpose, helping families get more out of life, powers everything we do.

And we want our people to get more out of life too! If you’re high-performing, ambitious and make the most of every opportunity, we want to hear from you. In return, you’ll enjoy heaps of flexibility, great perks and benefits, and the freedom to be yourself, keep learning and take your career wherever you want it to go.

If you love making a difference, you’ll love making it sparkle for millions of Very customers. ✨

About The Teams

Our software engineering teams are responsible for designing, building, integrating, and managing technology across all products and functions. They focus on developing secure, highly available, cloud-based solutions, utilising open-source technologies where appropriate. By employing APIs as a standard for integration, they facilitate robust communication between internal and external systems. Our teams adopt data and event-driven approaches, working iteratively and continuously to deliver high-quality solutions.

This role sits within our Retail Technology team, they own the creation and maintenance of our product catalogue and the prices we sell products at. We set pricing strategy, including when to run offers and which types of promotions to use. We manage product set-up end to end, on-site copy, categorisation, and navigation to help customers find products easily.

We also manage supplier contracts, stock planning, and forecasting to ensure timely replenishment. The Retail team are looking to leverage AI capability to improve our price decisioning process to improve our margin as an organisation and better value for our customers. Along side this we want to create more bespoke product copy and attribution so customers can find the products they want more easily. The roles will be linked to new squads being set up to deliver these initiatives and maintain, run and enhance them going forward.

About the role.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, building and running front-end and/or back-end software solutions in an agile delivery squad. This role is hands-on, you’ll be actively involved in designing, implementing and running the products and services that your squad are responsible for. You’ll help shape best practices in software engineering, then both work to and coach other Squad members into driving and ensuring high quality solutions.

What you'll be doing:

• Lead the full software development lifecycle, including coding practices, frameworks, technical debt, and operations within your squad.
• Collaborate with Engineers, Product Owners, Business Analysts, and Architects to design and deliver industry-leading systems.
• Influence and implement engineering standards and tools, driving adoption across squads and tribes.
• Design and build software that balances commercial needs with the future tech roadmap.
• Take ownership of code quality, non-functional requirements (performance, security, scalability), and best practices for logging, monitoring, and alerting.
• Drive improvements in continuous integration and deployment processes.
• Identify and mitigate risks, obstacles, and issues impacting technical products.
• Provide run support for technical products within your squad.
• Mentor and coach other engineers, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
• Champion engineering successes internally and externally to build our brand and attract talent.
• Stay ahead of the curve by understanding the external technology landscape and applying insights to enhance our engineering practices.

About you

• Extensive experience in building, integrating, and managing complex software architectures, ideally across multi-cloud environments.
• Strong hands-on experience with Java, AWS components, and CI/CD tools (e.g., GitLab CI).
• Proven ability to mentor and guide less experienced engineers.
• Passionate about code quality, testing, and engineering best practices.
• Skilled in building applications with security, reliability, scalability, and high availability from the ground up.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills.
• Degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Comfortable sharing knowledge and stories internally and externally to strengthen our engineering brand.

Some of our benefits

• Flexible, hybrid working model
• Inclusive culture and environment

• £1,000 flexible benefits allowance to suit your needs
• 30 days holiday + bank holidays
• Udemy learning access
• Up to 25% discount on Very.co.uk

• Matched pension up to 6%
• More benefits can be found on our career site

How to apply

Please note that the talent acquisition team are managing this vacancy directly, and if successful in securing this role, you will be required to undertake a credit, CIFAS, Right to Work checks and if a specific requirement of your role a DBS (criminal records) check. Should your application progress we require you to let the team know if there is anything you need to disclose in relation to any of these checks prior to them being undertaken, including any unspent criminal convictions.

What happens next?

Our Talent Acquisition team will be in touch if you’re successful so keep an eye on your emails! We’ll arrange a short call to learn more about you, as well as answer any questions you have.

For this role after meeting our Talent Acquisition Team you can expect a 2 stage process.

First Stage - A Take Home Technical Interview.

Second Stage - Behavioural and Technical Interview, this interview focuses on your technical and softer skills, how you like to work as part of a Software Engineering Team (60 minutes onsite).

If you'd like to know more about our interviews, you can find out here.

Diversity, inclusion and equal opportunities
We’re building a culture of everyday inclusion, and welcome applications from anyone who believes they can do the job. We don’t discriminate based on age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.

We want our recruitment process to be accessible to everyone. If you need reasonable adjustments to apply, interview, or perform a role, let us know via [email protected]. We’ll be happy to support you.

We’re proud to be a Disability Confident Committed Employer and have nine brilliant colleague networks - including DAWN (Disability Awareness at Very) and Think (Neurodiversity at Very) - that are helping us make Very an even more inclusive place to work.