Staff Engineer Big Data/Big Data Engineering Leader

We’re AD/01, the tech studio that builds the future of food retail. Whether it’s in-store aisles, online baskets, or behind-the-scenes operations, we innovate the daily food experiences for farmers and families, grandmas and greengrocers, and pickers and packers alike.

We’re part of the Ahold Delhaize network, one of the world’s largest global food retail groups and a leader in both supermarkets and e-commerce. With 19 strong local brands in Europe, the United States, and Indonesia, we create a meaningful difference for our customers, our people, and the world around us. And we’re looking for the freshest minds excited to create the recipe for change.

Your new role and environment.

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to join Albert Heijn's Enablement cluster within Albert Heijn's Retail Business Platform. Someone who combines deep technical expertise with genuine passion for data engineering and the ability to elevate entire engineering organization.

In this role, your technical decisions will shape the future of our data landscape. You'll own engineering decisions, guide practices, and design data solutions across multiple teams and value streams, impacting millions of customers and enabling smarter business decisions. 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 modern big data architecture inside and out. Not just the technology, but the business problems we're solving: making data scalable, resilient, and aligned with long-term goals.

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 designing fault-tolerant data pipelines, pair-programming with engineers, and translating business vision into technical roadmaps, we want to hear from you.

Key responsibilities of your role.

• Technology Ownership & Design Leadership: Together with Architecture, define and evolve the architecture of data pipelines, data marts, and platform components. Lead the design of scalable, fault-tolerant data solutions using Azure, Databricks, and modern data stack tools. This is the heart of the role.
• Engineering Excellence: Drive adoption of best practices in data modelling, observability, and DevOps. Ensure alignment of technical decisions with business priorities and future value stream needs. 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.
• Strategic Impact Across Value Streams: Act as a technical advisor across teams (Integrations, Ingestion, Batch and Stream processing, Data marts, Reporting and Analysis, Modernization, Gen AI), ensuring consistency and reusability. Translate business and product vision into long-term technical roadmaps.
• Technical Mentorship: Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of learning and innovation. Lead technical reviews, solution design sessions, and platform-wide initiatives. Pair with developers, review code, and lead by example.
• Thought Leadership: Stay ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies relevant to data engineering and retail. 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, 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 Data & Integration landscape that has the functional quality, agility and flexibility to promptly respond to the company's ambitions.

What’s in it for you?

We ask a lot. (We’re looking for the best, after all). But we offer a lot, too.

So, what do we have in store for you? We offer flexible hours and a hybrid working model, allowing you to work both from home and at the office. We provide competitive benefits to support health, well-being and your professional growth. This includes: a significant budget on benefit platform and a yearly bonus. At AD01 we welcome everyone, just the way you are, and encourage individual growth with valuable opportunities and a worldwide across-brand network.

Requirements.

• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience: 8+ years of experience in data engineering, with proven impact in architecture and technical leadership. You've shaped data platforms that scale, and you can show results.
• Cloud & Big Data Expertise: You bring deep expertise in Azure (Data Factory, Data Lake, Event Hubs), Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake. You've designed and built data solutions that handle enterprise-scale workloads.
• Hands-on Coding Excellence: You write code, not just software architecture diagrams. You have recent, hands-on coding experience applying modern development practices and tools. You're proficient in Azure, Python (PySpark), SQL, and Kotlin. You understand that great data engineering requires great software engineering.
• DevOps & Observability: You're comfortable with CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions, and Terraform. You know how to instrument data platforms using Prometheus, and Grafana. You build systems that are observable by default.
• Data Governance & Compliance: You bring strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and compliance. You know how to build platforms that are secure and trustworthy.
• Streaming Technologies: You have experience with Apache Kafka and real-time data processing. You can design robust streaming architectures supporting high-throughput, low-latency data exchange.
• 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. You're comfortable being a visible technical voice and can build alignment across diverse teams.
• Bonus: Prior experience in retail or large-scale data environments is a plus.

Apply now

If you’re excited to help us grow, then please apply now. If you feel like you might not tick all the boxes but have the skills and personality we’re looking for, then please also apply now!

Got questions? Don’t be shy. Madalina Pungaru at [email protected], has answers.

For us, diversity means being inclusive of thoughts and skills, generational differences, LGBTQ+, gender, race and ethnicity, disabilities, nationalities and more. We accept everyone for who they are.