Staff Engineer – Data & Integration – Albert Heijn – Zaandam

Overview

We’re seeking an exceptional Staff Engineer to join Albert Heijn's Enablement cluster within the Retail Business Platform. You combine deep technical expertise with a passion for data engineering and the ability to elevate the engineering organization.

In this role, your technical decisions will shape the 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’ll code alongside teams and set the standard for engineering excellence.

You should understand modern big data architecture and the business problems we are solving: making data scalable, resilient, and aligned with long-term goals. Hands-on experience with agentic development is required. We are pioneering GenAI-powered development capabilities and need a technical leader who can guide our teams with credibility and expertise.

If you’re a thought leader who can design fault-tolerant data pipelines, pair-program with engineers, and translate business vision into technical roadmaps, we want to hear from you.

Responsibilities

Technology Ownership & Design Leadership: 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.
Engineering Excellence: Drive best practices in data modelling, observability, and DevOps. Align technical decisions with business priorities and future value stream needs. Champion AI-assisted development and testing.
Agentic Development Leadership: Guide teams in leveraging GenAI-powered development tools effectively, establishing patterns and guardrails that accelerate delivery while maintaining quality.
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); translate business and product vision into long-term technical roadmaps.
Technical Mentorship: Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, lead technical reviews and platform-wide initiatives. Pair with developers, review code, and lead by example.
Thought Leadership: Stay ahead of industry trends in data engineering and retail. Partner with architects to evolve our technology strategy and keep the landscape future-proof.
Cross-functional Collaboration: Work with architecture, product and business teams to understand challenges and implement effective solutions.
Knowledge Building: Create clear, comprehensive documentation for engineering processes, configurations and best practices; ensure knowledge transfer and maintainability.
Problem Solving & Resilience: Troubleshoot complex issues, perform root cause analysis, and implement lasting fixes; turn incidents into learnings to strengthen the system.
Prototyping & Validation: Build prototypes to test ideas quickly and conduct rigorous testing to ensure solutions are reliable, scalable and performant before rollout.
Innovation: Develop a Data & Integration landscape with quality, agility and flexibility to support the company’s ambitions.

Your new team and office

Work on inspiring projects to accelerate the transition into a hybrid Food & Tech company. We value data and technology to future-proof food shopping. Teams collaborate across data, digital and tech domains. The office is located in Zaandam, near the train station.

We value a diverse, belonging team. Applicants from diverse backgrounds are encouraged. Don’t worry if you don’t check every box; we may still have room for you.

The recipe for maximum impact

Education: Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field.
Experience: 8+ years in data engineering with demonstrated architecture and technical leadership.
Cloud & Big Data Expertise: Deep experience in Azure (Data Factory, Data Lake, Event Hubs), Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake.
Hands-on Coding Excellence: Recent hands-on coding experience with modern development practices; proficient in Azure, Python (PySpark), SQL, and Kotlin.
DevOps & Observability: CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Terraform; instrument data platforms with Prometheus and Grafana; observable by default.
Data Governance & Compliance: Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and compliance.
Streaming Technologies: Experience with Apache Kafka and real-time processing; robust streaming architectures.
Infrastructure as Code: Familiar with IaC tools like Terraform or Pulumi.
Agentic Development Fluency: Hands-on with GenAI development, tooling like MCP, AI gateways or agentic workflows; able to guide others.
Problem-Solving & Analytical Rigour: Strong analytical skills and attention to detail; adept at debugging distributed systems.
Communication & Influence: Able to communicate technical concepts to engineers and business stakeholders; build alignment across teams.
Bonus: Prior experience in retail or large-scale data environments is a plus.

What we offer

An annual salary that can lead up to 120K including holiday allowance and a flexible bonus.
A minimum of 20 days paid vacation, with option for 12.5 extra days; flexibility to convert extra days into discounts or cash.
Flexible working hours
Access to AH Tech Academy – challenging training curriculum
Excellent pension plan with employer contribution 4.5x your contribution
Travel allowance or NS-business card for travel to Zaandam
10% staff discount on groceries (up to €300 per year)
Mijn Albert Heijn Premium membership
Company laptop and mobile device

We’re Albert Heijn, food retail reinventors

Albert Heijn has a long history of innovation and aims to grow the business with data and technology, to make shopping easier and more inspiring for millions of customers.

Ready to contribute to our mission? An assessment might be part of the selection process.

Would you like to learn more before you apply? We’re happy to share details about this vacancy.

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