Senior Platform Software Development Engineer

About the role

About the Platform

Our platform is the primary traffic control layer for Tesco Technology, handling over 100 billion requests per month at five-nines uptime. It routes and secures traffic across thousands of internal APIs, manages external ingress, and proxies Store-to-Cloud traffic from 50,000+ tills and devices across the UK, ROI, and Central Europe.

The platform is built on an Envoy control plane with a large, distributed fleet of Envoy proxies forming the data plane. All product engineering teams at Tesco rely on the platform to manage their traffic - routing, policy enforcement, observability, and resilience controls are provided as a shared capability across the organisation. As AI adoption grows, we are extending the same routing, policy, and observability stack to handle emerging Agent-to-Agent and MCP traffic - the same control plane problem, applied to new traffic patterns.

You will design, build, and operate this infrastructure. You will own reliability outcomes end-to-end and contribute directly to the platform's technical direction.

How We Work

We are a lean, senior engineering team - we move fast, ownership is high, and there is little distance between an idea and production. There is no separation between building the platform and running it. Engineers rotate between platform capability work and SRE streams so that everyone maintains deep, practical context across the system.

You will work closely with our London-based engineering team. We default to pairing on complex design problems, production debugging, and incident response - it improves the quality of decisions and keeps knowledge distributed across the team. We work three days a week from the Budapest office.

Why Join

The platform bridges Store-to-Cloud traffic from 50,000+ endpoints with internal API communication at massive throughput, built on a large distributed Envoy data plane with demanding reliability targets. You will join a lean team where ownership is real, the problems are hard, and the engineering decisions you make directly affect how every product engineering team at Tesco manages their traffic. The role covers platform engineering, SRE practice, and hands-on production ownership, with scope to shape both the platform and how the team operates.

What is in it for you

Tesco is a diverse and exciting employer, dedicated to being #aplacetogeton, providing career-defining opportunities to all of our colleagues. If you chose to join our business, we will provide you with:

• Permanent contract from the go - as a sign of our trust in your abilities
• Yearly salary bonus - based on both individual and business performance
• Extensive private healthcare - complex care package including a wide range of specialists, medical services, and free flu vaccination
• Cafeteria
• Relocation Help - professional service to secure relevant working permits and other necessary documents
• Learning opportunities - certified technical training and learning platforms like Udemy, Pluralsight, and O'Reilly
• Referral Bonus
• Learning culture and excellent opportunities to develop your career within your chosen field or something altogether new
• Varied and exciting projects to play a part in - there is always something new and exciting in the pipeline

If that sounds exciting, then we'd love to hear from you.

You will be responsible for

• Design and operate resilient traffic controls across Store-to-Cloud proxying, East-West and North-South routing, and emerging AI and MCP traffic - all running through an Envoy control plane and a large distributed data plane fleet.
• Own reliability end-to-end using SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets to keep the platform stable without sacrificing delivery velocity.
• Build internal tooling and automation that improves how we develop, operate, and evolve the platform - reducing toil, improving observability, and making the team faster.

• Lead incident response, participating in a two-person weekly on-call rotation, running post-incident reviews, and driving the structural changes that stop the same problems recurring.

You will need

We care about engineering judgement and production experience more than a specific set of tools. We are looking for engineers who bring some combination of the following:

• Experience in Platform Engineering or SRE, owning systems where availability directly affects business outcomes.
• Practical experience with L7 traffic systems - API gateways, reverse proxies, or control plane / data plane architectures - and a solid understanding of load balancing, rate limiting, and failure modes at scale.
• A track record of managing complex production incidents, running sustainable on-call rotations, and using operational data to drive engineering decisions.
• Strong fundamentals across distributed systems, networking, cloud-native infrastructure, and automation.

If the engineering challenge interests you but you do not tick every box, we still want to hear from you.

About us

Tesco Business Solution and Tesco Technology were established in Budapest in 2019, supporting the Tesco retail business in Central Europe and the Tesco Group. TBST and Tesco Technology are part of our global business services and technology organisations within Tesco.

In the UK, Ireland, India, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic we operate to offer great value to our customers every day.

In Budapest, our Technology hub currently employs more than 200 - and a growing number - of highly trained software engineers and managers who are implementing global software development projects across fulfilment, supplier and product management, online and in-store loss prevention, and our online grocery sites.

Our goal is to bring significant changes to the market by using the latest technologies. We are focusing on a large variety of modern technologies from the backend space and frontend to UX, UI and even data science and engineering.

We are aiming to drive business value through innovation and to create an organization that fundamentally transforms the retail environment.

We put accountability and ownership on the individuals and their teams in order to run a horizontal organization where teamwork is extremely important. With an end-to-end approach, we offer our colleagues opportunities for self-development and career growth.

Our colleagues are the key to our success at Tesco. We foster an environment of openness and collaboration. We draw from the diversity, knowledge and experience of our colleagues. It is all about equal opportunities, no matter who you are, or where you come from, you can get on at Tesco.

Our teams consist of individuals who can truly make a difference. Focussing on building a world-class business services centre alongside cutting-edge technology capability, they are working towards our goal of serving our customers and colleagues a little better every day.

We are expanding our operations locally and we are looking for the best talent.

When you join our Tesco Business Solutions or Tesco Technology team in Budapest, you'll be employed by TESCO-BST Üzleti és Technológiai Szolgáltatások Zártkörűen Működő Részvénytársaság, the Tesco legal entity responsible for your employment.