Staff Agentic Engineer

About the role

John Lewis and Waitrose, part of the John Lewis Partnership, are looking for a Staff Agentic Engineer to work in the London office (Pimlico, head office). The role sits within an engineering practice of 80+ teams covering cloud platforms, mobile apps, e-commerce and agentic engineering. It is a hybrid position, mainly split between working from home in the UK and the London office, with occasional visits to other locations.

Key responsibilities

• Work directly with business users in a small team to understand poorly defined operational problems and find ways to improve business processes.
• Build rapport with business colleagues and influence key decision makers.
• Use systems thinking, agentic AI and data analysis to understand underlying business problems and friction points.
• Identify and explore options for addressing the most important business issues.
• Create and iterate prototypes with business users to deliver short-term solutions, and use insights to inform architecture and product roadmaps.

Required profile

• Extensive software engineering experience with Java (or Kotlin) in a complex commercial environment.
• Experience of agentic engineering, including agentic coding environments and automated engineering workflows.
• Experience building and implementing agentic systems with agent orchestration and frameworks, and advanced prompt/context engineering.
• Understanding of state and memory management, deterministic guardrails and evaluation (evals), tool and API integration, and agentic protocols such as MCP, A2A and UCP.
• Experience with cloud-based data platforms (Snowflake) and deploying solutions on cloud infrastructure (GCP).
• Proven ability to turn raw data into actionable insights, and strong communication and influence skills.
• Desirable: data science techniques, systems thinking, and retail domain knowledge.

What we offer

• Salary of up to £115,000 depending on experience.
• Hybrid working, with offices open five days a week.
• Up to £200 towards tutored courses and a 25% discount at John Lewis and 20% at Waitrose.
• Holiday leave, pension and life assurance, and clubs and societies.

Applications go through the online form (CV upload and questions); successful candidates face a recruiter screening call and two interviews, one technical. Some roles are subject to pre-employment vetting, and vacancies may close early.