About the role
As a Security Innovation Engineering Manager in Tesco’s Innovation Engineering team, you will build and lead a new engineering capability that accelerates Tesco’s cyber defence through applied Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and modern engineering practices. You will help protect a retail ecosystem serving millions of customers, ensuring innovation is delivered safely, responsibly, and at scale.
This role combines hands-on technical leadership with strong stakeholder engagement, and you will be equally comfortable reviewing code and architecture as you are shaping strategy and communicating outcomes to senior leaders. Your focus will be on turning high-potential ideas into production-grade capabilities that deliver measurable security value without compromising trust, resilience, or responsible AI principles. In the immediate term, you and your team will focus on the needs of our Cyber Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering teams.
This team operates as an innovation incubator for Cyber Defence capabilities, rapidly exploring ideas, validating them through prototypes and experiments, and ensuring the strongest concepts move into secure, reliable production services. Depending on the nature of the capability, ownership may either remain within this team or transition to the most appropriate long-term service owner once the solution is proven and operationally ready.
You will work closely with our Security Automation Engineering team to build a shared roadmap of opportunities across Cyber Defence, helping us decide where to build, buy, or adapt technology to deliver our vision.
You will be responsible for
- Lead innovation-to-production delivery: Drive a portfolio of engineering initiatives that turn AI and automation opportunities into secure, reliable, and measurable security capabilities for Tesco. This includes establishing a clear process for idea generation, research, challenge, selection, and rapid prototyping, with close stakeholder involvement and clear success criteria.
- Set technical direction and standards: Establish pragmatic engineering guardrails aligned to Tesco’s wider engineering standards, including secure-by-design principles, testing strategy, code review discipline, and release approaches, so prototypes are safe, supportable, and suitable for real-world use.
- Champion applied AI with responsible governance: Lead the safe adoption of applied AI in cyber defence, ensuring appropriate controls, transparency, success measures, and risk management are built in from design through to operation.
- Operate with a product and service mindset using Agile methodologies: Manage roadmaps, backlogs, and delivery plans to ensure work is prioritised by security value, customer impact, and operational outcomes. Encourage early feedback, continuous learning, and a willingness to stop or redirect work when evidence shows a better path.
- Develop and retain talent: Coach and grow engineers through mentoring, feedback, and structured development, and hire inclusively using high-quality technical assessment to build a diverse, high-performing team.
- Influence across Cyber Defence and Technology: Partner with security and engineering teams to align priorities, remove delivery friction, and support adoption of new capabilities through clear communication, collaboration, and inclusive leadership.
You will need
- Demonstrable understanding of applied AI for cyber defence, including how to identify valuable use cases, evaluate feasibility and risk, define success metrics, and operationalise AI-assisted workflows in a human-accountable way.
- Demonstrable understanding of AI governance, compliance, and responsible AI, including practical awareness of common failure modes (data leakage, bias, hallucination, unsafe automation) and how to implement guardrails.
- Exposure to technical AI architecture and implementation, with the ability to review designs, challenge assumptions, and guide engineers towards secure, maintainable solutions without requiring you to be a data scientist.
- Demonstrable understanding of modern development lifecycles, including planning, design, build, test, deploy, operate, and continuous improvement, with an engineering-first approach to quality.
- Exposure to secure and test-driven engineering, including threat-aware design, automated testing approaches, and disciplined change control that protects reliability whilst enabling speed.
- Programming fluency sufficient to lead engineers effectively, including reviewing code, assessing technical quality, making informed decisions with the team, and supporting automation-first delivery approaches.
- Demonstrable understanding of data analytics and insights, including defining meaningful measures of success, spotting trends, and using evidence to prioritise and communicate impact.
- Exposure to product methodologies and backlog management, including shaping roadmaps, defining outcomes, and maintaining delivery focus using tools such as Jira.
- Strong communication and influencing capability, translating complex technical topics into clear decisions and trade-offs for varied audiences, and working collaboratively across diverse teams.
- Proven management and leadership behaviours, including coaching, performance development, creating clarity, and enabling engineers to do their best work.
- Demonstrable critical thinking and strategic problem solving, balancing innovation with operational reality, and making sound decisions under uncertainty.
- Commitment to inclusion and belonging, actively fostering a supportive environment where different perspectives are welcomed, and psychological safety enables innovation.
- Experience embracing and enabling change, helping teams adopt new ways of working and new technologies without destabilising delivery.
- Technical interviewing capability, assessing not only technical competence but also engineering mindset, learning agility, and inclusive behaviours.
Desirable Skills
- Familiarity with Tesco’s technology landscape and retail environment, including how security changes can affect customer experience and operational continuity.
- Awareness of core cyber defence technologies and patterns, for example detection and response platforms, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms, security data pipelines, and automation orchestration.
- Exposure to security architecture and practical approaches to evaluating and testing whether security controls work as intended.
- Evidence of contributions to the profession, such as community engagement, knowledge sharing, publications, talks, open source, or mentoring networks.
- Experience supporting structured professional development programmes, capability uplift, and skills-based progression for engineers.
- Basic awareness of and experience with IT Service Management (ITSM) tooling, such as Zendesk and xMatters, in the context of incident workflows and on-call collaboration.
Whats in it for you?
We’re all about the little helps. That’s why we make sure our Tesco colleague benefits package takes care of you – both in and out of work. Click Here to find out more!
- Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary.
- Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus Bank holidays).
- Private medical insurance.
- 26 weeks maternity and adoption leave (12 months service required at the qualifying date) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, we also offer 6 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
- Free 24/7 virtual GP service, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for you and your family, free access to a range of experts to support your mental wellbeing.
- This information is a shortened summary, refer to our policies for full details.
You might know us as a supermarket, technology company or even for our award-winning mobile network. Truth is, we’re all of those things, and much more. Our colleagues work with one goal in mind, helping to make every day a little better for our customers, colleagues and communities all over the world. No two customers are the same, neither are our colleagues.
At Tesco, we champion a balance that lets you thrive both in and out of work. Spend 60% of your week collaborating with colleagues at our office locations or local sites and the rest remotely. Whether you're just kicking off your career, juggling passions, or navigating big life events, we're here to support you. We always welcome a conversation about flexible working, so talk to us throughout your application about how we can support.
We're proud to be an accredited Disability Confident Leader, where everyone’s welcome. That’s why we commit to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process. If you need support with your application, click here for more information. And if you're interested in joining our team but don't tick every box, don't let that hold you back from applying.
