Engineering is at the heart of the Partnership. Johnlewis.com and Waitrose.com are central to what we do, our Online businesses have grown hugely in the last few years. Technology is in the hands of Partners across stores, in distribution centres and in our customer service centres as well as being key to how our customers interact with us.
Engineers at the Partnership work on a huge variety of projects and they drive what technology we use. Read more on how our Partner’s ideas are made into reality in the topics below
We encourage Partners to continually strive to learn and grow in their careers, and it’s no different for our tech team.
If you are a talented engineer who enjoys delivering in a multi-disciplinary team, we are looking for you! View our current software engineering vacancies and begin your journey to becoming a Partner.
We guide our work through a set of Engineering Principles which we have been proud to make public. These are not hard and fast rules but rather considerations we apply and use to guide us on a daily basis
Our johnlewis.com and waitrose.com e-commerce sites are built in house using a micro service architecture style. For johnlewis.com this means independently deployable Kotlin based services running in containers on GCP / Kubernetes. For waitrose.com we use Java as well as Kotlin, running on AWS.
Further up the stack React.js is the order of the day. johnlewis.com has evolved to a micro front-end architecture and waitrose.com is starting on that journey.
Apps teams use the latest versions of Swift and Kotlin to build our retail apps for iOS and Android. The Apps teams also look after some of their own services (using a Back End for Front End architectural style). These are built using the Swift/Vapour framework running in containers on GCP – this means a lot of our app developers are also backend devs!
Our data teams build cloud-based data pipelines on the GCP platform using Airflow/Cloud Composer with Python.
Our engineers work in cross-functional Agile Product teams. Product teams build and support new features that create business value. Within your product team you’ll typically be working collaboratively on customer-facing features with other highly skilled engineers as well as BAs, Testers, Web Designers and User Experience specialists.
All teams run their own CI / CD pipelines. These cover all the usual unit / functional / integration tests but also include performance, security and even some accessibility tests which enables new code to be pushed to live as frequently as needed. This keeps change lead times very short and some teams are deploying several changes to live each day.
We are advocates of the “you build it you run it” ethos. We want to empower our Engineers to build and run their services enabling ownership and also support moving fast and building reliability in to the product.
Continuous Learning is at the heart of our ways of working. Partners in Software Engineering are constantly learning, sharing ideas and knowledge, and actively supporting those around us to do the same. We value engineers coaching and mentoring each other.
We use a number of different modes of learning to increase knowledge of tech, techniques and ways of working. We learn through on the job experimentation; pairing with approachable and expert colleagues; through participation in a range of lively and hugely supportive communities of practice; and through access to training portals and conferences. Our Partners and teams participate in regular “Tech Bytes” sessions to showcase what they’ve learned.
Become part of a sustainable and ethical business
The Partnership takes an integrated approach to being a more sustainable, ethical business. Focusing on eight areas, each is critical if we are to protect the planet and respect and support the interests of all those touched by our business.
The eight focus areas are:
For more information see this page.
Become a co-owner of the business
The Partnership operates on democratic principles, sharing power with all Partners. Our first democratic council was set up over 100 years ago in 1919.
Today our democratic network of elected councils, committees and forums enables Partners to participate in decision making, challenge management on performance and have a say in how the business is run.
Whilst we do have an ever evolving set of technologies, frameworks and tools that we consider work well in the Partnership, Partners are nevertheless encouraged and recognised for suggesting and experimenting with new technologies and ways of working.
Some of our foundational decisions about how we deliver (e.g. our use of Kotlin as a language for API development in John Lewis) have arisen through empowered Partners bringing new ideas to their teams and proving their value. The theme of our recent internal engineering conference in September was The Empowered Professional in which we hosted twelve talks from Partners on a range of issues from continuous delivery in a payments setting, to the “permission” to be different in the Partnership.
If you are interested in reading more, check out the About the Partnership area which goes into detail about our excellent benefits and other useful information.
The breadth of my role, from hands on coding one hour to collaboratively making architecture decisions the next means I am always developing professionally.
Our whole team approach to quality means I can concentrate on the fun stuff – improving our engineering processes rather than acting as a gate keeper.
My favourite part of this job is the mentoring of other engineers. Our culture of continuous learning and our communities of interest make sharing a genuinely recognised part of the role.
I was trusted to lead development of our Front End Blueprint. Using it means teams can get an app up and out to production in a matter of hours.
Within a couple of months of joining the Partnership I was helping my team dramatically reduce its lead time and cycle time. Making that kind of impact is very rewarding.
Latest Head Office opportunities
London – Victoria
£55800 – £90000
Closing Date: 12/06/2022
£47100 – £69500
