Staff Agentic Engineer

John Lewis and Waitrose are complex businesses that use technology to retail large volumes of a wide variety of products through multiple retail channels with annual sales exceeding £13billion.

Our engineering practice includes 80+ teams, working on everything from Cloud platforms to mobile apps, from e-commerce functionality to agentic engineering.

Take a quick look at our Engineering best practices, hear our engineers talk about their experience and opportunities to learn and grow, and check out our Tech stack. Reach out if you have any questions. Visit - https://www.jlpjobs.com/engineering-jobs/

At a glance:

• Expected Salary: up to £115,000 (depending on experience)

• Flexible Working: This is a hybrid working role; therefore, your time will primarily be split between working from home (in the UK) and our Bracknell Office. However, there will also be an expectation to visit other locations as the need arises.

• Our Engineers currently work from the office roughly twice a week to connect and, on a more ad-hoc basis, to attend key meetings, but again the frequency is dependent on the business needs.  Our offices are open five days a week for those who prefer to work from the office more regularly.

Key Responsibilities

• Working directly with business users as part of a small team to understand poorly defined operational business problems and to identify opportunities to radically improve business processes.
• Using your excellent communication and influencing skills to quickly build rapport with business colleagues and to influence key decision makers.
• Using your excellent systems thinking, agentic AI and data analysis skills to work collaboratively with business colleagues to understand underlying business problems and friction points. 
• Using your excellent Agentic AI, Software Engineering and Architecture skills to identify and explore options for addressing the most important business issues. 
• Exploring short term solutions which drive immediate business value by creating and iterating prototypes in close collaboration with business users,
• Using your insights into how key parts of the business operate to inform architecture and/or product roadmaps. 

Essential skills/experience you’ll need 

• Proven hands-on experience in software development using Java (or Kotlin) to build reliable, high-performing backend services or modern applications.
• Extensive experience of software engineering in a complex commercial environment

• Experience of Agentic Engineering including working with agentic coding environments and automated engineering workflows
• Experience of building & implementing agentic systems using agent orchestration & frameworks and advanced prompt/context engineering.
• Understanding of state & memory Management, deterministic guardrails & evaluation (Evals), tool & API integration, agentic protocols including MCP, A2A, UCP.
• Experience of working with cloud based data platforms (we use Snowflake).
• Experience of deploying/running solutions on cloud based infrastructure (we use GCP).
• Proven ability to translate raw data into actionable insights that drive problem-solving
• Excellent communicator and influencer with the ability to question and challenge stakeholders to identify the root causes of problems.

Desirable skills/experience you may have

• Using data science techniques to extract actionable insights and meaningful patterns from raw data.
• Experience of using systems thinking techniques to solve complex, dynamic problems and find the leverage points.
• Domain knowledge of retail is useful but not mandatory. 

Next Steps: 

• The application form consists of a CV upload followed by application questions. Please ensure you refresh the page each time you complete a task to ensure you complete everything that you need to do before the closing date.

• If you are successful following your initial application, the next stages are: a screening call with a recruiter and then two interviews - one of which is more technical in nature.

We’re the largest employee owned business in the UK and home of our cherished brands, John Lewis and Waitrose. We’re not just employees, we’re Partners, driven by our purpose to build a happier world. As we look to our future, there’s never been a more exciting time to join us.  

We’re ruthlessly focused on being brilliant at retail. We continue to innovate, adapt and diversify. Never Knowingly Undersold on price, quality and service in John Lewis and passionately serving food-lovers in Waitrose.   

As Partners we all share the responsibility of ownership and in its rewards. We use our voices to contribute to our success, working together through the good and challenging times, holding true to our behaviours and treating everyone with kindness and respect. 

We all own making the Partnership somewhere we belong. Embracing our differences and creating an environment where we’re free to be ourselves and can THRIVE. Growing ourselves individually, and as a collective. 

As Partners, we make all the difference. And, we all own it.  

Important points to note:  

It’s important to note that some of our roles are subject to pre-employment vetting (which may include DBS checks for successful candidates). If required, you’ll be informed and provided with information about vetting during the recruitment process and we encourage you to complete any vetting documents quickly to avoid delays. Any DBS checks required will be carried out by a third-party registered body and financial probity checks may also be required for some of our roles.  

We occasionally close vacancies early in the event we receive a high volume of applications, and therefore, we recommend you apply early. If you require a reasonable adjustment due to a disability which means you may need longer to complete your application please contact us as soon as possible.

We want all of our Partners to have a good work-life balance and we support flexible working. This might mean flexible or compressed hours, job sharing or shorter hour contracts, where possible. Please discuss this further with the hiring manager during your interview.