Senior Security Innovation Engineer

Tesco UK, Welwyn Garden City, Hybrid, Full-Time, Working hours 36, Apply by 31-Aug-2026

As a Senior Security Engineer in Tesco's Innovation Engineering team, you will pioneer next generation security capabilities that proactively protect a retail ecosystem serving millions of customers. You will combine deep engineering expertise with an innovation mindset to build production-grade solutions that leverage applied Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and modern development practices to strengthen Tesco's cyber defence.

This role sits at the point where ideas become real: you will design, build, test, and ope rationalise capabilities that measurably reduce risk and improve resilience. You will also act as a technical leader, setting engineering direction, raising standards, and influencing across diverse security and technology teams with a customer-first focus. In the immediate term, you will focus on the needs of our Cyber Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering teams.

This team operates as an innovation incubator for cyber defence capabilities: rapidly exploring ideas, validating them through prototypes and experiments, and ensuring the strongest concepts graduate into secure, reliable production services. Depending on the nature of the capability, ownership may either remain within this team or transition to the most appropriate long-term service owner once the solution is proven and operationally ready.

You will work closely with our Security Automation Engineering team to build a shared roadmap of opportunities to deliver across Cyber Defence, ensuring we build and/or buy the best technologies to deliver our vision.

We're all about the little helps. That's why we make sure our Tesco colleague benefits package takes care of you both in and out of work.  to find out more!

• Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary.
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day plus Bank holidays.
• Private medical insurance.
• 26 weeks maternity and adoption leave (12 months service required at the qualifying date) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, we also offer 6 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
• Free 24/7 virtual GP service, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for you and your family, free access to a range of experts to support your mental wellbeing.
• This information is a shortened summary, refer to our policies for full details.

• Architect and deliver innovative security capabilities: Design and build high impact security solutions that improve Tesco's defensive posture, from concept through to production operation, with measurable outcomes.
• Embed AI augmented security engineering: Apply AI and automation to accelerate and improve security outcomes (e.g., enrichment, reasoning support, detection ideation and improvement, general engineering productivity), ensuring solutions remain safe, explainable, and fit for operational use.
• Lead modern engineering approaches for cyber defence: Use contemporary software development practices to turn ideas into secure, production-ready capabilities, with a focus on automation, experimentation, maintainability, and scale.
• Champion engineering excellence: Establish secure, test-driven approaches, code quality standards, automated testing, version control discipline, and repeatable release patterns to ensure innovation is reliable and maintainable.
• Share knowledge and inspire others: Showcase your work, build understanding, and foster excitement around the solutions you develop so innovation can scale beyond the team.
• Validate effectiveness and resilience: Design evaluation strategies and functionality testing so controls work as intended, regressions are prevented, and defensive improvements are demonstrable over time.
• Influence and enable change across teams: Collaborate with security and technology stakeholders to drive adoption of new capabilities, communicate trade offs clearly, and create inclusive ways of working that help teams succeed.

• Demonstrable expertise in applied AI for cyber defence, including identifying high value use cases, translating them into engineering work, and delivering outcomes safely with human accountability and appropriate guardrails.
• Exposure to technical AI architecture & implementation, with the ability to design, review, and refine AI enabled systems (data flows, model/tool selection, orchestration patterns, controls) without sacrificing security or operability.
• Demonstrable understanding of technical security architecture, including producing and defending design decisions, selecting appropriate patterns, and anticipating operational and threat-driven failure modes and designing against them.
• Strong programming capability, evidenced by building production grade tools, automations, or services with clear structure, maintainability, and secure engineering hygiene.
• Demonstrable understanding of secure & test driven engineering,…