Security Innovation Engineering Manager

As a Security Innovation Engineering Manager in Tesco’s Innovation Engineering team, you will build and lead a new engineering capability that accelerates Tesco’s cyber defence through applied Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and modern engineering practices. You will help protect a retail ecosystem serving millions of customers, ensuring innovation is delivered safely, responsibly, and at scale.

This role combines hands‑on technical leadership with strong stakeholder engagement, and you will be equally comfortable reviewing code and architecture as you are shaping strategy and communicating outcomes to senior leaders. Your focus will be on turning high‑potential ideas into production‑grade capabilities that deliver measurable security value without compromising trust, resilience, or responsible AI principles. In the immediate term, you and your team will focus on the needs of our Cyber Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering teams.

• Lead innovation‑to‑production delivery:
  Drive a portfolio of engineering initiatives that turn AI and automation opportunities into secure, reliable, and measurable security capabilities for Tesco. This includes establishing a clear process for idea generation, research, challenge, selection, and rapid prototyping, with close stakeholder involvement and clear success criteria.
• Set technical direction and standards:
  Establish pragmatic engineering guardrails aligned to Tesco’s wider engineering standards, including secure‑by‑design principles, testing strategy, code review discipline, and release approaches, so prototypes are safe, supportable, and suitable for real‑world use.
• Champion applied AI with responsible governance:
  Lead the safe adoption of applied AI in cyber defence, ensuring appropriate controls, transparency, success measures, and risk management are built in from design through to operation.
• Operate with a product and service mindset using Agile methodologies:
  Manage roadmaps, backlogs, and delivery plans to ensure work is prioritised by security value, customer impact, and operational outcomes. Encourage early feedback, continuous learning, and a willingness to stop or redirect work when evidence shows a better path.
• Develop and retain talent:
  Coach and grow engineers through mentoring, feedback, and structured development, and hire inclusively using high‑quality technical assessment to build a diverse, high‑performing team.
• Influence across Cyber Defence and Technology:
  Partner with security and engineering teams to align priorities, remove delivery friction, and support adoption of new capabilities through clear communication, collaboration, and inclusive leadership.

• Demonstrable understanding of applied AI for cyber defence, including how to identify valuable use cases, evaluate feasibility and risk, define success metrics, and ope rationalise AI‑assisted workflows in a human‑accountable way.
• Demonstrable understanding of AI governance, compliance, and responsible AI, including practical awareness of common failure modes (data leakage, bias, hallucination, unsafe automation) and how to implement guardrails.
• Exposure to technical AI architecture and implementation, with the ability to review designs, challenge assumptions, and guide engineers towards secure, maintainable solutions without requiring you to be a data scientist.
• Demonstrable understanding of modern development life cycles, including planning, design, build, test, deploy, operate, and continuous improvement, with an engineering‑first approach to quality.
• Exposure to secure and test‑driven engineering, including threat‑aware design, automated testing approaches, and disciplined change control that protects reliability whilst enabling speed.
• Programming fluency sufficient to lead engineers effectively, including reviewing code, assessing technical quality, making informed decisions with the team, and supporting automation‑first delivery approaches.
• Demonstrable understanding of data analytics and insights, including defining meaningful measures of success, spotting trends, and using evidence to prioritise and communicate impact.
• Exposure to…