Staff Software Engineer

All the details

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to play a pivotal role in evolving M&S’s Content Domain platform. This team provides the foundational content and media capabilities that power every digital experience across the business. Your “customers” are product teams, engineers, and content teams — and your mission is to make them faster, more autonomous, and more confident through robust platforms, APIs, automation, and excellent developer and editor experiences.

This is a role for an engineer who is excited by platform thinking, enablement at scale, and revolutionising how digital content, media, and DAM capabilities are modelled, delivered, and accessed across a large organisation.

About the Content Domain Team

Our platform team enables product, engineering, and content teams to build and ship faster with confidence. We deliver a reliable, scalable, and intuitive content and media platform, rooted in standards, automation, and great user experience.

We own the content foundation of M&S digital platforms, including:

• Structured content modelling and governance
• Federated GraphQL APIs
• Headless CMS and DAM integrations
• Automated asset and content lifecycles
• Platform tooling, documentation, and self‑service enablement

What You’ll Do

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Design, build, and evolve backend‑heavy platform capabilities for content and media, including APIs, services, automation pipelines, and developer tooling.
• Lead the design of event‑driven architectures (Kafka / Confluent or equivalent) to support scalable, resilient content and asset workflows.
• Own and evolve our federated GraphQL architecture, including schemas, orchestration, versioning, and standards.
• Contribute hands‑on production‑quality code, tackling the most complex technical challenges in the domain.
• Act as a technical authority on content platforms, headless CMS, DAM, and API‑driven architectures within M&S.

Who You Are

• A strong platform mindset: you build capabilities and tools that power many teams, not just individual features.
• Deep backend engineering experience with Java, including designing and running distributed systems in production.
• Strong experience on the Azure cloud platform, building and operating scalable, reliable services.
• Solid understanding of event‑driven architectures (Kafka / Confluent experience is a strong plus).
• Hands‑on experience with GraphQL — schema design, federation, evolution, and API governance (must have).
• Experience with headless CMS platforms and content modelling (strong plus).
• Working knowledge of TypeScript and JavaScript, particularly in API, tooling, or integration contexts.

What’s in it for you

Being a part of M&S is exactly that – playing your part to bring the magic of M&S to our customers every day. We’re an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and ever evolving business built on doing the right thing and bringing exceptional quality, value, service to every customer, whenever, wherever and however they want to shop with us.

Here are some of the benefits we offer that make working for M&S just that little bit more special…

• After completing your probationary period, you’ll receive 20% colleague discount across all M&S products and many of our third-party brands for you and a member of your household.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
• Discretionary bonus schemes awarded based on how you achieve your personal objectives and our performance as a business.
• A generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• A dedicated welcome to our teams with a tailored induction and a wide range of training programmes to develop your skills.
• Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices portal to maximise your financial and personal wellbeing.
• Industry-leading parental, adoption and neonatal policies, providing support and flexibility for your family.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support for all colleagues including access to our 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist to support you and your family.
• A charity volunteer day to support a charity or cause you're passionate about through a dedicated day away from work.

Everyone’s Welcome

We are ambitious about the future of retail. We’re disrupting, innovating, and leading the industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We’re transforming how we work together and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. Marks & Spencer strives to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers, and suppliers.

We are committed to building diverse and representative teams, where everyone can bring their whole selves to work and be at their best. We support each other and win together.

If you’d benefit from any support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please let us know when completing your application. #hybridrole #LI-Hybrid #LI-OT1