Engineering Manager - AH Store Operations Technology

Working at Albert Heijn is meaningful work. You work in an informal atmosphere alongside a passionate team that strives to stay ahead and make a difference. With your unique talents, you have an impact on the lives of our customers. You learn from experts in their fields, and we assist you in shaping your career. You can work flexibly with us, either from home or at our headquarters in Zaandam. A job at Albert Heijn is not just a job for now but also for the future.

What does this mean for you?

Team AH Store Operations Technology is looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to help redefine the traditional technology landscape into a modern, cutting-edge technology landscape (Microservices, Kotlin/Java, Kafka, React, MongoDB) for Albert Heijn Store Operations. This is a critical role in a complex and large cluster responsible for the applications supporting all employee and business processes in AH Stores in the Netherlands and Belgium.

This is how you will reinvent food retail.

1. Hands-on value delivery
   • Ensure team delivery is aligned and implemented according to the Tech Radar, OKRs, and Engineering Excellence Principles.
   • Be accountable as code owner together with your teams and be responsible for the team's technical performance.
   • Enable team members to build and run their applications autonomously and spend part of your time on coding.
   • Drive your teams to adhere to high quality standards in both development and operation of mission critical AH applications.
   • Work closely with the architects and help roadmap the architecture visions and execute them.
   • Build an engineering team that welcomes technical discussions and challenges, while ensuring the application is fit for purpose.
2. Leadership and People Management
   • Organizing, decision-making, and mentoring.
   • Organize teams to be fully empowered, autonomous, and correctly “T” shaped.
   • Instill an engineering culture in your teams and the broader platform.
   • Guide team members to uphold high code quality standards.
   • Ensure there is a healthy culture in the team and that team members can bring their whole selves to work.
   • Play an active role in facilitating the growth, mentorship, and learning of DevOps engineers.
3. Vision, Strategy and Alignment
   • Drive and execute the Vision & Strategy OKRs.
   • Align the team to the mission and vision of the Tech department and understand their role in the delivery.
   • Balance technical and product roadmap goals and priorities for the applications you are responsible for.
   • Work together with different departments and stakeholders.

Your new team and office.

Together with your teams, you will work on inspiring projects to accelerate our transition into a hybrid Food & Tech company. We want to leverage data and technology to future-proof food shopping and give our customers access to healthy food more easily. At Albert Heijn, you team up with inspiring peers in the data, digital, and tech domains—a community of diverse individuals who share a common goal: to create digital solutions that make (online) shopping simpler and more inspiring. Are you ready to reinvent the way millions of people buy and enjoy their food? 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. We are located right next to the train station of Zaandam.

What do we offer?

• To be courageous
• To live wholeheartedly
• To keep growing

What we offer.
At Albert Heijn we aim to grow, and this is only possible if you grow along with us. As we work together to build our brand and your career, you can count on (based on 40 hours per week):

• An annual salary up to 140K including holiday allowance and a flexible bonus, depending on your level of seniority and experience.
• A minimum of 20 days paid vacation, optionally 12.5 days extra. Do you want to take that extra time off, or would you rather convert the extra days into discounts or sell them for cash? You’re the end boss!
• Flexible working hours.
• Access to a challenging training curriculum – AH Tech Academy.
• An excellent pension plan where we as an employer contribute 4.5 times more than you as an employee.
• A travel allowance or an NS-business card for traveling to and from Zaandam by train.
• Attractive discounts on various insurance policies.
• 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 and telephone.

What do you bring?

• Inspirerend leiderschap
• Een verbindend karakter
• Sterke tech skills

The recipe for maximum impact

As an Engineering Manager, you will be responsible for the products and applications your teams build and maintain, as well as the mentorship and well-being of team members:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, familiar with the DevOps methodology, cloud engineering, observability, and security. You should be well versed in programming high quality Kotlin/Java, React, and PL SQL code and be familiar with technologies like Kubernetes, Kafka, MongoDB, and OracleDB. Knowledge of Outsystems is a plus.
• Good understanding of Microservices Architecture.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience leading multiple teams (10+ persons), with excellent communication skills in English. Speaking Dutch is a plus.
• Experience working on large scale complex projects, preferably in a large enterprise environment.
• Able to create an environment to grow and learn while keeping focus on the developer experience.
• Experience mentoring tech talent and developing learning and growth pathways for engineers.
• A learning mindset and eagerness to keep up to date with IT trends, new technologies, and other relevant focus areas.
• Comfortable presenting and public speaking and able to clearly articulate a vision and strategy for the team to execute. You manage expectations both up and down the organization and control conflict. You're good at managing budgets.
• You are strong in the negotiation of products and services needed for the team and will create a network with vendors.
• You have an Agile mentality and focus on delivering value at every iteration. You can think strategically and inspire and encourage teams to design for the long term. You automate wherever possible.
• Located in The Netherlands.

We’re Albert Heijn, food retail reinventors. 🚀
Albert Heijn goes way back—more than 135 years, to be exact. For millions of people, food shopping is synonymous with the Albert Heijn brand. We didn’t achieve this with a complacent, ‘hey, if it works today, it’ll work tomorrow’ approach, but by continually rethinking our propositions and staying plugged in to customer demands. More than 125,000 colleagues? Check. Over 1,250 stores in the Netherlands and Flanders? Check. The leading online food retail platform? Check, we build, run, and love it.

Together we make eating better the easy choice. For everyone.

The world around us has changed, and significantly at that. These changes have impact on the lives of our customers, colleagues, and partners. And therefore, also on Albert Heijn. We’re moving towards a new world with new opportunities and challenges. Albert Heijn wants more people to eat fresher, healthier, and more sustainable food. Eating brings us together, keeps us healthier, and contributes positively to the world. Our mission is: Together we make eating better the easy choice. For everyone.

Albert Heijn the Netherlands is B Corp certified. This underscores our purpose, through which we aim to contribute to a healthier, more social, and sustainable society. B Corp certification is a designation that a business is meeting high standards of verified performance, accountability, and transparency.

What matters to us?

Ahold Delhaize is one of the world’s largest food retail groups and a leader in both supermarkets and e-commerce. Together, we help people eat well, save time, and live better – it’s how we make a difference. And we do it because we care: for our customers, our people, and the world around us.

Be courageous

"I realized how much impact you can truly have as an individual, working for such a huge international company.”
Robert Němec Solution Architecture Manager

Live wholeheartedly

“The support this company has always offered means the world to me."
Christy Elgee Manager of Cyber Defense and Operations, Ahold Delhaize USA

Keep growing

“I feel the freedom to show initiative, propose changes and try new things. Having that freedom gave me wings to fly.”