Principal Backend Software Engineer

Who are We

The Mobile Fulfilment Systems department at Ocado is at the forefront of developing cutting-edge automation solutions for both in-store and warehouse online order fulfilment. We leverage distributed backend systems, intuitive mobile applications, and advanced autonomous mobile robots to enable fast, scalable, and cost-effective order collection.

Within this department, the Chuck Norris team is dedicated to building the software systems powering our Mobile Robotics products. Our scope spans mobile apps, backend microservices, workflow orchestration, integration APIs, and cloud-native components. All these drive the success of our flagship Chuck Autonomous Mobile Robot.

This role is central to shaping the architecture, scalability, and reliability of Ocado’s cloud-based backend systems for mobile robotics. Your contributions will directly influence the efficiency and intelligence of our autonomous robot fleet in real-world operations.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Feature Development: design, implement, and deploy critical product features with a microservices architecture using Node.js (TypeScript) and Golang.
• System design & scalability: design, implement, and optimize scalable, cloud-native single and multi-tenant services (using patterns for complex distributed systems).
• Cloud & Infrastructure: optimize and scale the backend cloud-based managed services in GCP (Kubernetes, PubSub, etc.) and/or AWS. Create alignment with Ocado best practices, tooling, and standards.
• API development: develop efficient APIs, event-driven systems, and data pipelines.
• Performance & reliability: ensure high availability and performance of the backend system.
• Continuous improvement: refactor, optimize, and enhance code quality, reliability, and maintainability.
• Collaboration: work closely with product managers, technology and business leadership and engineers from different teams, to deliver end-to-end solutions.
• Maintenance & support: participate in on-call rotations, lead efforts in effective and efficient troubleshooting – root cause analysis, and resolution of production issues.

You might be also involved in:

• CI/CD pipelines: manage automated deployment pipelines (CircleCI and Jenkins).
• Infrastructure: enhance CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes deployment strategies, and automation.
• Mentoring & knowledge sharing: coach and develop engineers, and foster technical growth.

What Are We Looking For

Essential:

• Ability to lead architectural decisions and drive and communicate long-term technical strategies.
• Extensive hands-on experience in backend design and development, including scalable, multi-tenant, and high-performance systems in production. Focus on designing and implementing event-driven architectures (Pub/Sub, event sourcing, or similar technologies).
  Product and result-focused positive mindset.
• Deep expertise in backend engineering, with hands-on experience in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Java, C#, TypeScript) and backend frameworks (e.g., Node.js, Spring Boot, ASP.NET Core, Express.js, or similar), and a broad interest in learning and working with other technologies.
• Strong background in cloud computing (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and containerized environments (Kubernetes, Docker, or similar technologies).
• Mentorship experience, with the ability to coach engineers and influence engineering direction.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with PostgreSQL, GraphQL, GCS, Terraform.
• Proficiency in cost optimisation and performance tuning for cloud-based applications.
• Experience in security, compliance, and resilience engineering.

Our Social Benefit Package Includes

The feeling of being part of a team that makes a difference in the world of automation and smart technology is great but here’s also a list of our social benefits.

• Hybrid office attendance policy that sees you onsite 40% of your time
• 30 days of “Work from anywhere” program
• 30 days of annual leave
• Share plan program
• 300 BGN additional monthly allowance
• Enhanced maternity and paternity leave policy
• Medical plan including health & dental coverage
• Life and disability insurance
• Employee assistance program

We also have regular divisional socials, sports clubs not to mention the Ocado Technology Academy for a packed schedule of courses, conferences and events. If you think you have what it takes to make a difference, please submit your application below.