Head of Software Development – DevEx & Agentic AI – Welwyn Garden City, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Overview

In this role you will steer developer experience and tooling for Tesco’s global software teams, aligning strategy with execution to enable agentic AI for coding. You will lead geographically dispersed teams and partner with suppliers, shaping the SDLC and tooling to balance speed with security and resilience. Your thought leadership will keep you at the forefront of agentic coding, delivering measurable impact to thousands of engineers and millions of customers. This is a high-visibility mission at a leading retailer with strong emphasis on data- and product-led decisions.

Pay / Benefits

• Annual bonus up to 45% of base salary
• Car Cash Allowance
• 25 days holiday + personal day + bank holidays
• Private medical insurance
• Retirement savings plan with Tesco contribution (1.5x)
• Maternity and adoption leave; paternity leave

Responsibilities

• Budget ownership and supplier relationships in tooling and agentic coding
• Continual evaluation of new tools and build-vs-buy decisions
• Operate and improve key developer tools (GitHub, SonarQube, Nexus)
• Shape SDLC strategy in light of Agentic AI
• Lead initiatives to enable agentic AI for development teams
• Provide thought leadership across Technology on Agentic AI in coding and SDLC
• Own developer experience through data gathering, insights, and opportunity identification

Key requirements

• Proven experience leading geographically dispersed teams and managers
• Strategic vision with comfort in ambiguity and autonomous decision-making
• Strong decision-making balancing conflicting factors
• Excellent communication and influencing across levels
• Vendor management experience with procurement and legal teams
• Budgets, forecasts, and software development economics understanding
• Experience in product-led and data-led problem definition and discovery
• Solid SDLC knowledge and perspective on AI impact
• Hands-on software engineering background with empathy for engineers
• Experience leading teams running what they build with on-call/operational support
• Ideally background in developer experience or platform engineering
• Knowledge of agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor)

• strong communication
• influence and stakeholder management
• adaptive leadership in fast-moving environments
• agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor)
• system design and architecture
• GitHub, SonarQube, Nexus administration and optimization

…