Description 12 month fixed term contract (parental leave cover) | Hybrid – Home / London Store Support Centre In a Nutshell As Head of Digital Central Trading, you’ll lead the end‑to‑end Digital Trade Plan for Food, ensuring we deliver brilliant customer experiences and commercial outcomes across key trading moments. You’ll step back from category‑specific detail to shape a cohesive, customer‑led digital plan, leading Digital Events, high‑traffic content strategy, and our Implementation function to ensure timely, accurate change across the site and app. This role is pivotal in uniting planning, digital trading, marketing, and analytics to deliver exceptional results. What You Are Accountable For Defining and leading the Food Digital Trade Plan, ensuring clear visibility of key activities across quarterly planning cycles. Partnering with Brand Planning & Proposition to align digital activity with wider business ambitions and channel‑specific moments. Creating a consistent, shared approach to Category Planning with Digital Trading peers. Orchestrating pan‑category digital events (e.g., Easter, Christmas, Halloween) across planning, execution, design, and in‑event optimisation. Ensuring high‑traffic content (e.g., Homepage) delivers improved customer engagement, experience and commercial performance. Working with SEO, Digital Marketing and CRM teams to deliver a clear, effective traffic acquisition and retention strategy. Overseeing the Implementation function to ensure all site/app content changes are delivered accurately, efficiently, and on time. Leading Digital Trading performance for Food to Order (Occasions), ensuring commercial targets are achieved. What You Need to Know and Show Essential Skills & Experience Highly competent in web analytics, with strong experience using data to build plans and optimise performance (Adobe Analytics experience desirable). Previous senior‑level experience in a Trading/Commerce function within a large retail business, with deep understanding of digital performance levers. Broader Skills & Behaviours Experience managing homepage and high‑traffic digital content strategies. Strong analytical and insight‑driven mindset, able to interpret and present performance data clearly and actionably. Proven ability to coach, develop and inspire large teams, enabling confident decision‑making and high performance. Skilled at influencing stakeholders and navigating conflicting priorities across multiple business functions. Ability to anticipate, diagnose and resolve complex problems, removing blockers across divisions to secure the right digital outcomes. Excellent storytelling and communication skills, both written and verbal, able to translate strategy into clear direction. Demonstrates leadership behaviours: customer‑obsessed, performance‑driven, collaborative across boundaries, and committed to building fearless, high‑performing teams. Responsibilities We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. As the link between sellers and buyers, retail and head office, our retail operations team is the cog that keeps things running. With teams focused on store facing, labour, transformation, online, delivery and contact centre work, we touch almost every part of the business. It’s an incredibly fast-paced environment where you need to pivot not just daily, but often hourly. So while we plan all we can, it’s vital that we all think outside our job descriptions and look to optimise and improve how we do everything. There’s also a real team ethos. After all, it’s people like you who are going to truly transform this part of the business. Qualifications We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 65% of salary, depending on how we perform (in cash and shares). Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private heathcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. You'll also receive a company car cash allowance unless you are going to travel 10,000 business miles in your role, then you'll be able to choose a car. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme. Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave. Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibiity criteria may apply).