Staff Engineer - Retail Finance

How you can make a difference

We're looking for an exceptional Staff Engineer to join the Retail Finance cluster within Albert Heijn's Retail Business Platform. Someone who combines deep technical expertise with genuine passion for retail technology and the ability to elevate entire engineering organisations.

Retail Finance is visible in everything we do. It needs to be reliable, robust, and ready for whatever business ambition the organisation pursues. In this role, you'll provide hands-on technical leadership, driving the transformation from our traditional Oracle landscape into a modern, cutting-edge tech foundation. You won't just architect solutions. You'll roll up your sleeves, write code alongside our teams, and set the standard for engineering excellence.

We're specifically seeking someone who understands the Retail Finance domain inside and out. Not just the technology, but the business problems we're solving: balancing reliability with flexibility, ensuring compliance while enabling speed. You should also have hands-on experience with agentic development. We're pioneering GenAI-powered development capabilities that are fundamentally changing how we build software, and we need a technical leader who can guide our teams into this new paradigm with credibility and expertise.

If you're a thought leader who's equally comfortable whiteboarding architecture, pair-programming with developers, and leading complex legacy transformations, we want to hear from you.

This is how you will reinvent food retail.

• Engineering Excellence: Raise the bar on software delivery across our platform. Drive improvements through DORA metrics, world-class reliability and observability, rapid incident response, and disciplined technical debt management. Champion AI-assisted development and testing as the new standard.
• Core Modernisation: Lead the strategic transformation of our Oracle legacy stack. Design and implement robust migration paths to modern data platforms and services using our Kotlin/React stack and microservices architecture. This is the heart of the role.
• Technical Software Architecture: Drive end-to-end technical software architectures together with Architecture on complex programmes and initiatives within Retail Finance (and cross-platform) to achieve the desired technology transformation of our core.
• Agentic Development Leadership: Lead our transformation into agentic coding practices. Guide teams in leveraging GenAI-powered development tools effectively, establishing patterns and guardrails that accelerate delivery while maintaining quality.
• Paved Roads & Integration Patterns: Create, maintain, and promote Paved Roads delivering modern engineering patterns for integration, backend and frontend, including GraphQL APIs, streaming data integration with Apache Kafka, and event-driven workflows. Make the right way the easy way.
• Technical Mentorship: Provide hands-on guidance to fellow engineers, fostering a collaborative and innovative work environment. Strengthen the engineering community through code reviews, pairing, and leading by example.
• Thought Leadership: Stay ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies relevant to retail finance. Partner with architects to evolve our technology strategy and keep our landscape future-proof.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with architecture and product teams to understand challenges, identify opportunities for improvement, and implement effective solutions.
• Knowledge Building: Create clear, comprehensive documentation for engineering processes, configurations and best practices. Make knowledge transfer effortless and maintainability a given.
• Problem Solving & Resilience: Troubleshoot complex issues across our platform, driving root cause analysis and implementing lasting fixes. Turn incidents into learnings that strengthen the entire system.
• Prototyping & Validation: Build prototypes to test ideas quickly. Conduct rigorous testing to ensure solutions are reliable, scalable and performant before rolling out at scale.
• Innovation: Create a Retail Finance landscape that has the functional quality, agility and flexibility to promptly respond to the company's ambitions.

Your new team and office.

Together with the teams you will work on inspiring projects to accelerate our transition into a hybrid Food & Tech company. At Albert Heijn, you team up with inspiring peers in the data, digital and tech domains to create digital solutions that make (online) shopping simpler and more inspiring.

We invest heavily in data, digital and tech. And that includes investing in your career! Our teams work in a hybrid way: both from home as well as in the office.

Don’t check all the boxes? Don’t worry, we probably don’t either 😉. Don’t hesitate to apply if you think you are up for the challenge!

The recipe for maximum impact.

• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience: 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with proven impact in architecture and technical leadership. You've shaped platforms that scale, and you can show results.
• Legacy Transformation Experience: You've led organisations through the transition from legacy, monolithic finance systems to modern, scalable frameworks. Experience migrating from Oracle or similar systems is highly valued.
• Finance Systems Expertise: Deep expertise in designing and delivering modernisation solutions for large-scale, distributed finance systems, including event-driven, API-first, and cloud-native architectures.
• Kotlin/React Stack Proficiency: Comfortable leading a Kotlin/React-based stack and practices, challenging and operationalising strategic architecture while liaising with product managers, engineers, and architects.
• Data Migration Mastery: Expert knowledge of data migration strategies, including data modelling, schema evolution, and integration with modern databases and streaming platforms like Apache Kafka.
• API Design Excellence: Skilled in both REST and GraphQL API design, creating flexible, consumer-driven interfaces.
• Data Governance & Security: Experience in data governance, security, and lifecycle management; integrating and exposing finance master data through standardised, reusable services. Asynchronous messaging, pub/sub patterns and microservices architecture are second nature.
• Hands-on Coding Excellence: Recent, hands-on coding experience applying modern development practices and tools, with strong understanding of software quality and secure coding practices.
• Infrastructure as Code: Familiarity with IaC tools like Terraform or Pulumi.
• Agentic Development Fluency: Hands-on experience with GenAI-powered development, including tooling like MCP, AI gateways, or agentic coding workflows.
• Problem-Solving & Analytical Rigour: Excellent analytical skills and meticulous attention to detail; thrives on debugging complex distributed systems and turning ambiguity into clarity.
• Communication & Influence: Communicates technical concepts effectively to both engineers and business stakeholders; can build alignment across diverse teams.
• Bonus: Experience with SAP or PeopleSoft is a plus.

What we offer.

• An annual salary that can lead up to 120K including holiday allowance and a flexible bonus.
• Hybrid working
• Wellbeing initiatives
• Cross brand career options
• Flexible working hours
• Access to a challenging training curriculum – AH Tech Academy
• A minimum of 20 days paid vacation, optionally 12.5 days extra (convert extra days into discounts, sell them for cash, or take the time off).
• An excellent pension plan where we as an employer contribute 4.5 times more than you as an employee
• A travel allowance or a NS-business card for traveling to and from Zaandam by train
• 10% staff discount on groceries in all Albert Heijn stores, to a maximum of €300 per year
• A free Mijn Albert Heijn Premium membership with many benefits
• A company laptop (Mac/Windows) and telephone (iPhone or Android)

Meet your colleagues

"We need to offer the best digital experience: that's our goal!" Robert Němec Solution Architecture Manager

"An endless race we must win" Christy Elgee Manager of Cyber Defense and Operations, Ahold Delhaize USA