Software Engineering Leader (AI & Tech)

Tech & Innovation

Software Engineering Leader (AI & Tech)

We are Inter IKEA, a Franchisor in the IKEA Franchise ecosystem. We are also on the journey to consolidate the digital capabilities and business processes at Retail Concept (one of the pillars of Inter IKEA) across the leadership areas IKEA Retail Experience, Brand & Marketing, Learning and Development and Expansion. A journey that needs passionate people who embrace change and development, dare to question and want to make a difference. If that sounds like you, come and join us. Together, we can do great things so IKEA can be an even better home furnishing retailer in the future.

This role belongs to a group called Retail Concept Operations, which covers multiple areas of responsibility, one of which is Digital Capabilities, where this team resides.

Our team is known as AI&Tech, and our mission is to empower other teams to build GenAI-powered applications through the innovative capabilities of our platform. We take pride in supporting our co-workers by providing them with relevant information in their moments of need through the ChatBots we are developing. While we may be a small team, this allows us to operate with agility, enabling us to act quickly, thoroughly test our ideas, and pivot effectively in our efforts. At the same time, we are constantly keeping in mind that our goal is to have a satisfied IKEA customer.

About you…

You believe that creating great digital products means they are fit for purpose, and software engineering supports the business. You have extensive software engineering experience, having worked with architecture and other engineers, and you are curious to learn new things. As you will be at the forefront of technology with GenAI, you possess leadership skills and are adept at explaining and presenting. Since this position is an engineering leader role, we think that you are well-versed in the IKEA concept, understand brand and commerciality, as the ultimate goal for all of us at IKEA is to serve our customers, regardless of whether the solutions you are building have an immediate impact on them. Last but not least, we believe you are ready to roll up your sleeves and be fully hands-on in building (both backend and frontend), maintaining, and supporting our solutions.

As a Software engineering leader in AI&Tech, you will:

• Be accountable for engineering and solution architecture within the AI & Tech team, but also aligning engineering work across different teams
• Be the one who leads by example in working hands-on on the solutions day to day
• Collaborate with engineering chapter members, but especially with the Digital product leaders, defining the engineering roadmap for the solution.
• Collaborate with architecture to ensure the overall solution and implementation across products from a technical engineering perspective to fit together in the scope of a domain, aligned with strategies and direction to maintain consistency and alignment with the broader IKEA ecosystem.
• Act as an ambassador for engineering and security best practices in the domain and across the organisation.
• Do the onboarding of new engineers in the AI & Tech team
• Contribute to exploring and developing new technologies to improve system performance and reliability, as well as position stack evolution in the architecture strategic roadmaps.
• Evaluate existing engineering practices and recommend improvements.
• Act as a senior member of the broader technology organisation, expected to represent technology internally within IKEA and externally in the market.
• Be a champion of engineering principles and assist the digital product leader.

In addition, we believe that you:

• Minimum 10 years of software development experience
• Minimum 3 years of hands-on solution architecture
• Proven hands-on experience with LLMs, ML platforms
• Proven experience in developing GenAI applications, particularly chatbots
• Strong familiarity with Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS..) and containerisation technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Proven experience with Graph databases (Neo4j or GraphDB), SQL and NO-SQL (PostgreSQL, CosmosDB, MongoDB) and data ingestion (ETL pipelines with Databricks)
• Good knowledge of JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, and Java. Any other OOP and functional languages are a plus
• Experience in agile and domain-driven product development

More Information

This position is full-time (40 hours per week) and is located in Delft. Some travel will be required. In this role, you will be reporting to the Software Engineering Manager.

At IKEA, we are looking for people who believe everyone deserves a seat at the table. You’re welcome no matter where you come from, what you believe, and what you look like. We don’t even care how you have furnished your home. We’re interested in you simply because you’re you. Even if your experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. We believe that people’s different perspectives, backgrounds, and personalities make us better at understanding our customer's dreams and needs. At IKEA, we’re all on the same project.