About the role

As the UK’s most successful omni-channel retailer which includes two of the UK’s most loved department store and grocery brands, with annual sales revenues in excess of £12B. The Partnership also includes a rapidly growing Financial Services business, with growth of 22% in 2022/23. Our Engineering practice includes 60+ teams, working on everything from Cloud Platforms to Mobile Apps, from eCommerce functionality to Machine Learning. Our Engineers work collaboratively and share knowledge, and learning is extremely important to us. We support our Engineers to continuously improve their skills and keep abreast of the latest technologies. This advertised role, Senior Quality Engineer (Mobile), is known internally as Product Engineer (PL6). (Find out more about being a Product Engineer in the Partnership, and the technology we use.

Contract type - This position is a Permanent contract.

Working pattern/flexible working -
We have a blended hybrid approach of working from our offices and a remote UK location. You should plan to be working remotely for approximately 60% of the month. However in practice, time in the office is a decision made within your team, and may mean that you do not come into the office for weeks or months at a time, unless you choose to.
We have opportunities linked to both our John Lewis Head Office in London Pimlico and Waitrose Head Office in Bracknell, Berkshire.

Key Responsibilities:

We are driving a culture of whole team accountability for quality and continuous testing and are looking for people who can help us do that. Initially, as a Senior Quality Engineer you will be embedded into a software engineering product team composed typically of a Delivery Lead and a mixture of iOS and Android Engineers, and Analyst(s) delivering our mobile apps.

As well as creating and executing some of the team’s checks, your role in the team will be to mentor others in testing practice; coach them to adopt and improve their quality approaches including deployment approaches and observability; review and contribute to the team’s codebase and pipeline configuration; help the team with their system of work from first business need to monitoring services in production. At all times you will also have an eye on what good looks like to the customer / user.

As a senior member of our Quality Engineering Community you will mentor more junior members and help them with their personal development.

You will work with a diverse range of technical and non-technical stakeholders which will require excellent communication skills. Advocating for improved engineering approaches will also require strong stakeholder management capability.

There are opportunities to become a people manager for your fellow engineers if that is something that appeals to you.

Learning new skills is extremely important to us. Engineers are expected to continuously improve their skills and keep abreast of the latest technologies and techniques regardless of their experience or job grade. In return for this commitment you will be given the resources and support you need to help you with your learning journey.

Essential skills/experience you’ll need

For this role we are looking for a hands-on Senior Quality Engineer who has extensive knowledge, skills and experience of delivering native mobile apps for iOS and / or Android devices.

Knowledge of architectural patterns used to build mobile applications.
Practical experience of Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery of native mobile apps and associated back end services.
Coaching teams in use of Continuous Testing and shift left / shift right approaches.
Thinking critically about engineering approaches, using questioning techniques to lead team discussions about quality risks and appropriate responses.
Leading elaboration activities (such as three amigos sessions) to ensure specificity, consistency and testability of requirements and acceptance criteria.
Reading and writing coded solutions for a variety of engineering needs:
- pairing with developers to understand and jointly enhance unit, functional and other coded tests
- developing testing utilities
- developing and maintaining code in pipelines
- creating and maintaining coded checks such as native mobile test automation or automated tests for back-end APIs.
Working knowledge of modern testing tools and frameworks for testing mobile apps, preferably XCTest / XCUITest and/or Espresso.
Analysing mobile non-functional risks (performance, resource usage, variable bandwidth, device compatibility, accessibility etc.) and advising on how these risks should be mitigated.
Understanding operational and non-functional requirements (such as resilience, performance and observability) and how solutions are implemented and tested.

Desirable skills/experience you may have

Bitrise/Gitlab CI
GraphQL
Backend for Frontend (BFF) patterns
Microservice Architectures
Experience of cloud infrastructure such as GCP or AWS.
Understanding of mobile security threats and experience of automated security testing.

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About The Partnership

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 also recommend that you apply as soon as possible as vacancies can close early if we see a high number of applicants.

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.

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