Software Engineering Leader (AI & Tech)

Job Description

We are on the journey to consolidate the digital capabilities and business processes at Retail Concept 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.

The main responsibility areas in the Retail Concept Operations (RCO) following the new Inter IKEA operating model are

· Retail processes End-to-End

· Digital capability areas

· IKEA.com and IKEA.net channels

· ROSS

The job as Software engineering Leader is a leading assignment for the AI & Tech digital product in one of our digital capability areas.

About you

You believe that creating great digital products means they are fit for purpose and software engineering is a means for supporting the business. You have extensive experience in software engineering, working together with architecture and other engineers and you are curious to learn new things. As you will lead other engineers, you are skilled in leadership and good at explaining and presenting. As this job is an engineering leader job in the AI & Tech digital product area, you must also be well rooted in the IKEA concept and understand the brand and commerciality as the AI & Tech is an enabling capability for both customer and co-worker solutions such as IKEA.com and learning.

In addition, we think 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, chatbots

· 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 language is a plus.

· Experience in agile and domain-driven product development

· An excellent knowledge of high-performant SL1 services as the runtime part of AI & Tech must meet high non-functional requirements.

As software engineering leader, you will

· Be accountable for engineering and solution architecture within the AI & tech area but also align engineering work across teams within the domain.

· Collaborate with engineering chapter members but especially with the digital product leader 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

· Ensure modularize, scale, and integration while meeting resiliency, performance, and reusability, along with business and architecture goals.

· Drive adoption of design patterns, efficient usage of cross-cutting technology platforms, and solutions to reuse across product teams in the domain to enable efficiency and avoid unnecessary duplications.

· Act as an ambassador for engineering and security best practices in the domain and across the organization.

· Onboard new engineers in the AI & tech area

· Contribute to the exploration and further development of new technologies to improve system performance and reliability and position stack evolution in the architecture strategic roadmaps.

· Decide and communicate on strategic engineering priorities, emphasize collective goals, co-create and own technical roadmap in the graph tech area.

· Evaluate existing engineering practices and recommend improvements.

· Act as a senior member of the broader technology organization, expected to represent technology both internally within IKEA and externally in the market.

· Be a champion of engineering principles assisting the digital product leader

Additional 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. 
If you have a special need that requires accommodation in the recruitment process, just let us know. 

Please note that due to the upcoming holiday season in December, our recruitment process may take a bit longer than usual. We will do our best to keep all candidates updated on their status before any breaks. Thank you for your patience during this time! 

Please send your application – CV in English by latest 7th of January 2025. We really want to get to know you, so make sure you tell us why you want to work at IKEA and why you would be a good fit for this role.