Software Engineering Specialist | Commercial Intelligence | Retail Concept Operations

Job Description

Hej Software Engineering Specialist,

Inter IKEA Group connects IKEA franchisees with range development and suppliers and ensures alignment of the overall IKEA strategic direction. Every day, we strive to develop, produce, and sell products and services that are affordable and accessible to everyone.

This role is positioned in Retail Concept Operations, Software Engineering Competence Hub. You will belong to the Commercial Intelligence team, reporting to the Technology Manager.

In Retail Concept Operations, as part of Retail Concept, we protect, develop, and enable the IKEA Concept across markets and franchisees. We turn the "what" of the IKEA Concept into the "how" of everyday retail operations, making it easy to use, scale, and trust across the value chain.

We take pride in working in progressive ways of working, with empowered teams and strong digital competence. We focus on simple, practical solutions that strengthen both short- and long-term low cost, while supporting consistency and quality in how the IKEA Concept comes to life.

Together, we build ways of working where teams take ownership, collaborate closely, and continuously improve, so we can create meaningful value for IKEA, our franchisees, co-workers, and the many people.

Digital Engineering and Technology Platform Management is where we build, run and continuously improve the digital products and platforms that power the IKEA franchise offer. We bring together software engineering, platform engineering and quality engineering competence to create optimal preconditions for the business and people who design, develop and manage IKEA's offer across a connected and optimised value chain — all to deliver growth and enable low cost.

We are fully integrated into the development process, providing competence, tools, solutions, processes and ways of working across many different areas. We work in cross-functional, agile teams that value ownership, collaboration and continuous improvement, and we're never done exploring better tools, technologies and practices to build a stronger digital foundation for IKEA's digital products and business.

Our team is based in Malmö, Sweden. We believe that your presence with the team and working the majority of the time in the workplace is important.

About the role

As a Software Engineering Specialist, you’ll play an important part in the team and bring valuable IKEA knowledge into a new setting. In the coming years, we will continue to grow our ontology models and graph-based capabilities. Your primary focus will be bridging abstract data models and real, running systems — working closely with ontology modellers, data engineers and business experts. You will bring deep semantic technology expertise to a team that's shaping how IKEA understands its own data.

This is a level 3 software engineering role, with wider vertical and horizontal responsibilities than a standard software engineer. Your specialisation gives you a broader remit: you'll act as the go-to expert within your domain, contribute to cross-cutting engineering decisions, and actively shape how your specialism is applied across teams but also primarily in the product team that works with graph technologies. The impact of our work continues to resonate in homes and hearts across the world.

On a typical working day, you will:

• Build, maintain and continuously improve Knowledge Graph solutions that enable connected and high-quality product data.

• Translate ontology models into scalable runtime graph implementations that support business needs.

• Collaborate with ontology modellers, data engineers and business experts to optimise reasoning logic, inferencing capabilities and data pipelines.

• Partner with the central IKEA Knowledge Graph team and stakeholders across Inter IKEA to align standards, ways of working and technical solutions.

• Develop, test and maintain high-quality software solutions that are reliable, scalable and ready for production.

• Drive and promote software engineering best practices, including CI/CD, automated testing and agile ways of working.

• Explore and evaluate new technologies, tools and architectural patterns to improve performance, innovation and productivity.

• Work closely with colleagues across teams, contributing to robust and reusable solutions that create long-term value.

• Create and maintain technical documentation and actively share knowledge with peers and stakeholders.

• Contribute to solution design, ideation and prototyping activities that help shape future capabilities and business outcomes

Qualifications

What we’d like you to bring to the table

The role as a Software Engineering Specialist requires you to:

• Bring a degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field, combined with extensive hands-on experience in software development.

• Have solid experience of semantic technologies and knowledge graph development to apply in a production environment.

• Know how to use ontology modelling standards such as RDFS, OWL, SHACL and SKOS to create, maintain and validate semantic models and controlled vocabularies.

• Be able to develop and manage RDF-based knowledge graphs using modelling tools such as Metaphactory, including adapting and extending solutions to meet business needs.

• Work with graph databases, such as RDFox, and leverage graph-based data models to support scalable and efficient data solutions.

• Design and optimise SPARQL queries and rule-based logic to enable effective data retrieval, inferencing and reasoning capabilities.

• Ensure the performance, scalability and maintainability of knowledge graph solutions through continuous optimisation and engineering best practices.

• Collaborate in agile, cross-functional product teams using DevOps ways of working and modern software engineering approaches.

• Apply software engineering principles, architectural thinking and design patterns to create robust and sustainable solutions.

• Communicate complex technical concepts in a clear and accessible way to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Share expertise across teams and contribute as a specialist within your capability area.

It’s a plus if you also:

• Have experience working across multiple teams or capability areas as a specialist or subject matter expert.

• Are familiar with the IKEA brand, culture, values and ways of working.

Additional Information

We welcome your application

This role is published as part of an internal recruitment process connected to our organisational changes. It offers an opportunity for co-workers whose experience and competence may be relevant.

We look forward to receiving your application by the 18th of November at the latest. We encourage you to apply as soon as possible, as we might start interviewing early for certain roles. If you have any questions about the role or the recruitment process, or if you have a special need that requires accommodation in the recruitment process, feel free to contact the Recruiter Calvin Blyth - (calvin.blyth2@inter.ikea.com)

We always recruit based on values, competence, potential and diversity. Once competence requirements are met, we will first consider impacted co-workers employed in Inter IKEA Systems BV, Inter IKEA Systems Services AB and Inter IKEA Technology Services AB and secondly impacted co-workers at Inter IKEA Group.