People at Pret work hard, have fun, learn a lot and really grow. Right now, we’re looking for a passionate Head of Engineering & Integrations to join us at either our London or Manchester office.
Pret is an international on-the-go food and drink retailer founded in 1986. Our purpose is to make every day a little bit brighter, through organic coffee, freshly prepared food, and exceptional customer service to millions of people. Pret runs hundreds of shops across the UK, France, USA, and Hong Kong, with additional shops run by franchise partners around the world.
The Role
The Head of Engineering and Integrations will work as part of the BI and Business Systems Team to develop and define Pret’s software engineering, system integration, and data strategy. Working alongside Pret’s IT functions and the Director of BI and Business Systems the role will ensure that Pret is constantly benefitting from the best engineering services and integration technology. This is a hands-on leadership and engineering role and will remain pragmatically engaged in designing, managing and supporting a technical solution framework, working with our selected partners, and defining Pret’s engineering and integration direction.
The Head of Engineering and Integrations will assist in defining technology and engineering principles to aid Pret’s software, data and business systems strategy and delivery reliable and verified data into Pret’s technology architecture as required. Participating and inputting into Pret’s technology governance process, the Head of Engineering and Integrations will sit on the Data Governance Forum and will deputise for the Director of BI & Business Systems as required.
In addition to the Director of BI & Business Systems, the Head of Engineering and Integrations role serves as Pret’s primary authority on Software and Data Engineering. Supported by Pret’s partner network, this role will define Pret’s overall strategy for engineering including product delivery, vendor guidelines, ETL and data ingestion, cleansing, governance & storage principles, data pipelines, and methods for data enrichment.
This role will be key in supporting Pret’s planned technology strategy and wider ecosystem overhaul from legacy solutions to a cloud-first, modern architecture as well as managing a portfolio of on, near and offshore development resources.
What will I be doing?
* Assist in setting technology strategy, architecture, and engineering principles for Pret’s technology function as well as relevant partners
* Lead the engineering organisation to successful delivery of business outcomes.
* Build strong working relationships with business leaders to ensure engineering and integration teams meet expectations and contribute to achievement of business goals.
* Drives innovation across Pret’s technology functions, providing expertise and mentorship to the unit as a whole
* Ensures that Pret always benefits from the most appropriate technology choices, with an eye on strategic ambition, speed of change as well as cost
* Supports technology partners in delivering change in line with Pret’s overall technology strategy of creating modular, cloud-first solutions
* Develops strong relationships and collaborative ways of working at all levels across internal and external stakeholders.
* Owns, builds, and maintains Pret’s engineering and integration roadmap, such that it is easily communicated to partners and the wider technology functions, and in such a way that it can adapt to the changing commercial landscape.
* Manages alerting, monitoring & incident management to ensure robust processes are in place for support and health of Pret engineered solutions.
* Inputs into approaches across the technology landscape including code repositories, development pipelines, security requirements. Master Data Management, Data Quality, Data Lineage, Data Dictionaries and BI/Analytics.
* Overseeing teams of inhouse & outsourced engineering (software, data, integration) capability across the tech stack – onshore & offshore – inc. management of onboarding & offboarding teams & suppliers
* Defines repeatable patterns, tools and approaches for all teams, ensuring that data and services are landed in the desired target architecture in a timely, secure manner
* Authors and agrees engineering and data principles that third-party product teams will follow, and challenges both suppliers and Pret to evolve them appropriately
* Contribute to the development and evolution of retail and ‘martech’ solutions alongside data and BI systems.
* Ensures Pret’s data and business systems are stored, maintained, and accessed in the most appropriate way, ensuring compliance and quality are built into every solution.
* Build a culture that supports learning, collaboration, transparency, and inclusiveness.
Skills and experience
* An expert engineer, well versed in data storage, code, development practices ETL methodologies, and integration / orchestration layer ranging from traditional SaaS platforms and data warehousing to data lakes, unstructured data, and bespoke software developments.
* Experience with front end, back end & mobile (node, react, Kotlin, swift)
* Experience with integration, development and data environments using cloud platforms, extending to the vendor specific tooling exposed by those platforms
* Experience in the use of multiple logical constructs to form layered, well curated data to surface to data customers of varying skill levels and appetites.
* An understanding of the needs of data modellers, data scientists and business insight analysts, including familiarity with technologies supporting the use of AI & ML workloads and wider BI use cases
* An understanding of software engineering, code best practices and vendor management over these areas.
* Passionate about staying on top of tech trends, experimenting with, and learning new technologies
* Ability to identify software or technology opportunities and drive the introduction of new tools and processes across teams and disciplines
* A sought out, innovative leader for their engineering and solution design skills
* An expert practitioner in their core discipline and are skilled in several other areas. They have experience and knowledge of several domain and product areas.
* Experience in setting strategic direction as well as leveraging external expertise alike.
* Ability to translate business requirements to technical requirements and communicate effectively between audiences.
* An excellent communicator with good spoken and written English language skills.
* Experience in agile ways of working, DevSecOps, SRE and continuous delivery
* Experience in the broader food & beverage commercial landscape, including how technology can enhance customer experience, operational efficiency, and cost optimisation.
Pret offers:
* Competitive salary and annual bonus
* 33 days holiday a year including Bank Holidays
* Private healthcare
* Life assurance
* Pret pension scheme
* Season ticket loan
* Free lunch and drinks
* 50% discount in Pret shops worldwide
* Great reward and recognition events
* Legendary parties
At Pret, we embrace a hybrid working model, with our team spending three days a week in the office.
The deadline for applications for this role is Thursday 23rd January 2025.
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