Staff AI Engineer - AI Specialist (12M FTC)

As a Staff AI Engineer, you will be the technical specialist connecting AI ambition to delivery reality across Sainsbury's Tech. This is a hands-on engineering role with division-wide scope. You will set the bar for how AI is engineered across the division, creating reusable patterns, defining standards and working across every Tech domain to ensure we build AI capabilities once and share them everywhere. The role is intentionally cross-cutting. Where most engineers go deep in one team, you will go wide across many, identifying duplication, reducing friction, and leaving every team you touch with stronger AI engineering capability than before.

This is not a policy role . You'll write code, build proofs of concept, and solve hard problems alongside delivery teams. But your primary measure of success is the multiplier effect you create, not the features you ship directly.

What you need to do

• Define and champion reusable AI engineering patterns, accelerators, and reference architectures that delivery teams across Sainsbury's Tech can adopt with confidence.
• Translate proven engineering workflows into reusable skills and agents that standardise delivery, reduce duplication, and accelerate teams across Sainsbury's Tech.
• Work across Tech domains (Customer, Channels, Supply Chain and Logistics, Argos, Data and AI Ecosystem, and more) to identify duplicated effort, converge on shared approaches, and reduce the cost of building AI solutions.
• Lead technical discovery and feasibility assessment for high-priority AI opportunities, providing clear, evidence-based recommendations on viability, effort and expected value.
• Build and maintain a living library of production-ready patterns covering areas such as RAG, agentic AI, LLM integration, prompt engineering and responsible AI guardrails.
• Facilitate cross-domain engineering forums, design reviews, and communities of practice, creating the conditions for AI engineering knowledge to flow freely across the organisation.
• Work hands-on alongside delivery teams to accelerate them through complex technical challenges, pairing, coaching, and transferring capability rather than taking over.
• Influence the AI and data platform roadmap, working with Platform Engineering, Architecture, and the AI Centre of Excellence to ensure strategic tooling meets the needs of delivery teams.
• Contribute to engineering standards and guardrails for AI development, ensuring solutions are secure, observable, responsible, and aligned to our strategic platforms.
• Stay ahead of the rapidly evolving AI landscape, evaluating new models, frameworks and platform capabilities, and translating emerging potential into actionable patterns for the organisation.
• Champion responsible AI principles across every solution and team you engage with, ensuring outputs are fair, explainable, and aligned to our governance framework.

What you need to know

• Deep, hands-on engineering experience with AI technologies including large language models, generative AI and agentic systems.
• Proficiency in Python and modern cloud-native development practices (Azure preferred).
• Practical experience with prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), fine-tuning, and AI orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent.
• Strong understanding of data engineering fundamentals and how AI solutions interact with data platforms, pipelines, and governance.
• Experience operating across large-scale enterprise environments, navigating security, compliance, and integration complexity.
• Familiarity with Sainsbury's strategic platforms (Snowflake, Azure, AWS, Microsoft 365 Copilot) is advantageous.
• Awareness of responsible AI principles and practical experience applying them in delivery contexts.

What you need to show

• A track record of engineering impact at organisational scale, not just team level. You have made other engineers and teams more effective, not just delivered your own work.
• Ability to move from ambiguous problem statements to working solutions at pace, comfortable operating in uncertainty and converging through experimentation.
• Strong technical communication skills, able to translate complex AI concepts clearly for non-technical stakeholders and articulate trade-offs confidently with engineering peers and architects.
• A genuine drive for knowledge sharing and capability building, actively lifting the AI engineering skills of those around you.
• Excellent collaboration and influencing skills, able to build trust quickly across Product, Engineering, Architecture, Data Science, and leadership.
• Strong judgement on build vs. buy vs. configure decisions, particularly in a fast-moving AI tooling landscape.
• Comfort operating across the full spectrum from low-code AI configuration to deep pro-code engineering, selecting the right approach for each context.
• High levels of technical curiosity balanced with pragmatism, knowing when good enough the right call is and when rigour is non-negotiable

What decisions I can make

• Technical approach, architecture, and engineering standards for AI solutions across Sainsbury's Tech.
• Selection and curation of reusable AI patterns, accelerators, and reference implementations.
• Recommendations on feasibility, go/no-go, and scaling readiness for AI proofs of concept.
• Tool and framework selection for shared AI engineering patterns, aligned to strategic platform direction.

Support we will provide

• Access to personal development tools including industry leader Bitesize talks, online self-development tools, and internal mentoring/coaching.
• Direct access to Sainsbury's AI and Data platforms, tooling, and cloud infrastructure.
• A collaborative environment working alongside Product, Architecture, Data Science, and Engineering leadership.
• Opportunities to attend external AI/ML events and conferences.
• Technical development resources, including access to relevant learning platforms, certifications, and emerging technology previews.

Benefits

• Generous colleague discount across Sainsbury's, Argos, and Habitat
• Competitive holiday allowance
• Private Health Care
• Bonus schemePension 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 save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. 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 (which may vary for Nectar360), depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. 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, salary 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.

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 for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).

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