We're looking for an exceptional Staff Engineer to join the Merchandise, MDM & Sourcing 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.
In this role, you'll provide hands-on technical leadership across 12+ development teams building the software that powers one of the Netherlands' largest retailers. Our in-house applications and services enable end-users to optimise, plan and execute pricing, promotions, assortment and product placement across 1,250+ stores. You won't just architect engineer 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 Merchandising, Master Data Management and Sourcing domains inside and out. Not just the technology, but the business problems we're solving. Equally important: you should 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 software architecture, pair-programming with developers, and challenging teams to rethink how they work in an AI-augmented world, 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.
•    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. This is a key area where you can make a real difference.
•    Paved Roads & Integration Patterns: Shape and maintain our Technology Area communities. Drive adoption of modern integration patterns (GraphQL APIs, streaming data with Apache Kafka, and event-driven architectures) making the right way the easy way.
•    Technical Mentorship: Provide hands-on guidance to teams operating at speed without sacrificing stability. Know when to give autonomy and when to establish guardrails. Pair with developers, review code, and lead by example.
•    Thought Leadership: Stay ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies relevant to retail and Merchandising domains. Partner with architects to evolve our technology strategy and keep our landscape future-proof.
•    Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with architecture, product and business teams to understand challenges in pricing, promotions, assortment and Sourcing, then translate those into effective technical 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 Merchandise, MDM & Sourcing 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. We want to leverage data and technology to future-proof food shopping and give our customers access to healthy food more easily available for everyone. 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 in Zaandam.  
We think it’s important to be part of a highly belonging team; a team where you can be yourself and feel safe, accepted and appreciated. For this job we are preferably looking for someone who brings diversity to our team, in the widest possible sense. Someone who is a great addition to our team by bringing other ideas to the table. 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 done this before. You've led organisations through the transition from legacy environments to modern microservices architecture, and you understand the patience, pragmatism and technical rigour it requires. Experience migrating from Oracle or similar monolithic systems is highly valued.
•    Enterprise Integration Expertise: You have deep expertise in designing and delivering integration solutions for large-scale, distributed systems. You command enterprise integration patterns and have hands-on experience implementing event-driven and API-first architectures. You've transformed organisations from brittle point-to-point integrations to modern, scalable frameworks, and can show the results.
•    Kotlin/React Stack Proficiency: You can lead the engineering community to a Kotlin/React based stack and practices befitting that stack. You're comfortable challenging and operationalising strategic architecture while liaising with product managers, engineers, and architects.
•    Kafka Mastery: You bring expert-level knowledge of Apache Kafka. You can design robust streaming architectures supporting high-throughput, low-latency data exchange. You've built producer/consumer applications, managed schema evolution, and implemented fault-tolerant pipelines. You understand what it takes to reliably move Merchandising and Master Data at enterprise scale.
•    API Design Excellence: You're skilled in both GraphQL and REST API design, creating flexible, consumer-driven interfaces that downstream teams actually want to use. You think in contracts and understand the value of well-designed access points.
•    Data Modelling & Schema Management: You bring strong experience in data modelling and schema lifecycle management. You know how to integrate and expose diverse master data (product hierarchies, vendor records, pricing attributes, promotional details) through standardised, reusable services. Asynchronous messaging, pub/sub patterns and microservices architecture are second nature.
•    Hands-on Coding Excellence: You write code, not just architecture diagrams. You have recent, hands-on coding experience applying modern development practices and tools. You bring deep understanding of software quality, secure coding practices, and front-end testing frameworks.
•    Infrastructure as Code: You have familiarity with IaC tools like Terraform or Pulumi.
•    Agentic Development Fluency: You have hands-on experience with GenAI-powered development, including tooling like MCP, AI gateways, or agentic coding workflows. Ideally, you've used these tools to ship software and can credibly guide others to do the same.
•    Problem-Solving & Analytical Rigour: You bring excellent analytical skills and meticulous attention to detail. You thrive on debugging complex distributed systems and turning ambiguity into clarity.
•    Communication & Influence: You communicate technical concepts effectively to both engineers and business stakeholders. Ideally, you've shared your expertise publicly through conference talks, articles, or community contributions. You're comfortable being a visible technical voice.

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 that can lead up to 120K including holiday allowance and a flexible bonus.
•    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 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)
 
We’re Albert Heijn, food retail reinventors. 🚀 
Albert Heijn goes way back. More than 135 years, to be exact. So, 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 an 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. 
 
Ready to contribute to our mission? 
Do you want to play an active role in changing the food retail landscape as we know it? Then hop on board and join us on our expedition. Would you like to learn more first, before you apply to Albert Heijn? We’re happy to tell you everything about this vacancy! An assessment might be part of our selection process. 

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