Head of Software Development - DevEx & Agentic AI

This is a unique opportunity to play a leading role in how software products are built within a leading global retailer with real impact across millions of customers and thousands of software engineers.

Reporting to the Director of Engineering Effectiveness and Capability, you will lead teams that focus on overall developer experience, developer tooling and will lead our efforts to evolve how software engineering is done in the world of agentic AI. You’ll play a key role in shaping strategy as well as driving execution. You’ll provide thought leadership through keeping your knowledge and expertise in agentic coding up to date through continual evaluation of new technologies and practices and be able to balance pace of delivery with the need to be secure, resilient and prudent. The impact of your work will be felt by over 2,500 software engineers.

You’ll manage and provide leadership to teams based in India and Hungary.

•Budget ownership, partnership and commercial relationships with existing suppliers in the developer tooling and agentic coding space. Continual evaluation of new tools and build vs buy decisions.

•The ongoing evolution and operational excellence of our key developer tools such as GitHub, SonarQube Nexus and others that support software development activities.

•Key input into the definition and continual evolution of the strategy for how our SDLC evolves in the light of Agentic AI.

•Accountability and leadership to execute how agentic AI is enabled for development teams.

•Thought leadership across the whole Technology organisation around Agentic AI for coding and other aspects of the SDLC.

•Overall ownership of developer experience including gathering quantitative and qualitative data, driving insight and identifying areas of opportunity.

• Proven experience of leading geographically disparate teams and managing managers.
• Ability to shape strategic direction; deal with ambiguity and operate autonomously in a fast-evolving space making timely decisions without perfect data and be able to operate in an intent-based way vs seeking approval.
• Strong ability to make decisions that balance multiple, often conflicting factors.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills downwards, across and upwards.
• Proven experience in managing significant vendor relationships, evaluating offerings and working effectively with procurement and legal teams.
• Strong understanding of budgets, forecasts and the economics of software development activity and agentic AI.
• Experience of working in an organisation that values product-led and data-led problem definition and discovery.
• A solid understanding of all aspects of a typical SDLC and opinions on where AI can have the biggest impact.
• Prior experience as a hands-on software engineer which allows you to have a strong understanding and empathy of engineers’ needs and views.
• Experience in leading teams who ‘run what they build’, managing effective operational support and on-call engineers.
• Ideally: prior experience of working in a developer experience, platform engineering or similar role.
  
  

Skills

• You are naturally curious and have built up expertise with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or Cursor but you have a bias towards solving problems not dogmatic solutions.
• Ability to keep knowledge up to date through effective building of networks, data sources and ability to identify and distil key trends and directions and then apply context to how you interpret them.
• Strong system design and architecture skills and instincts.
• Exceptional people management skills including how to manage talent and performance and grow the people around you.

Tesco Business Solution and Tesco Technology were established in Budapest in 2019, supporting the Tesco retail business in Central Europe and the Tesco Group. TBST and Tesco Technology are part of our global business services and technology organisations within Tesco. In the UK, Ireland, India, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic we operate to offer great value to our customers every day. In Budapest, our Technology hub currently employs more than 200 – and a growing number – of highly trained software engineers and managers who are implementing global software development projects across fulfilment, supplier and product management, online and in-store loss prevention, and our online grocery sites. Our goal is to bring significant changes to the market by using the latest technologies. We are focusing on a large variety of modern technologies from the backend space and frontend to UX, UI and even data science and engineering. We are aiming to drive business value through innovation and to create an organization that fundamentally transforms the retail environment. We put accountability and ownership on the individuals and their teams in order to run a horizontal organization where teamwork is extremely important. With an end-to-end approach, we offer our colleagues opportunities for self-development and career growth. Our colleagues are the key to our success at Tesco. We foster an environment of openness and collaboration. We draw from the diversity, knowledge and experience of our colleagues. It is all about equal opportunities, no matter who you are, or where you come from, you can get on at Tesco. Our teams consist of individuals who can truly make a difference. Focusing on building a world-class business services centre alongside cutting-edge technology capability, they are working towards our goal of serving our customers and colleagues a little better every day. We are expanding our operations locally and we are looking for the best talent. When you join our Tesco Business Solutions or Tesco Technology team in Budapest, you'll be employed by TESCO-BST Üzleti és Technológiai Szolgáltatások Zártkörűen Működő Részvénytársaság, the Tesco legal entity responsible for your employment.