Staff Software Engineer

All the details

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you’ll be joining a well-loved historic brand, working on solutions that serve millions of loyal customers and thousands of colleagues! With ethical values that run right through the company’s core and technology leaders that truly understand software engineers and engineering, it’s an exciting time as we’re redefining ourselves into a digital first and engineering-led organisation, with the quality of our engineering team being a key differentiator.

We are seeking a passionate Staff Software Engineer who is passionate about building platforms and tools to support other engineers. Someone who is interested in building long term, reusable solutions for complicated engineering problems. Someone who is detail oriented, quality focused and willing to work in the open and cares about raising the bar at M&S.

We are looking for people to join our engineering community that are excited about building platforms. Our objective is to bring leverage to our engineering teams through a reliable PaaS solution. .

What You’ll Do

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Building high-quality, easy to use internal platforms for other engineers.
• Build and maintain high-quality, reliable software and own it with a high degree of automation in the cloud.
• Own complex tasks in the backlog and deliver them routinely with no significant issues.
• Develop and improve M&S standard frameworks and policies, ensuring that they are understood and adopted.
• Support other engineers to produce clean, quality code through code reviews and pair programming.
• Drive DevOps practices to automate the Product development life cycle and solution through experimentation and innovation as a culture.
• Support the technical platform out of hours as a member of the support rota.
• Contribute and create Product Group OKRs and demonstrate responsibility for the entire team’s teams' objectives.
• Coach, mentor and develop by providing the knowledge and assets to less experienced engineers.
• Lead the measurement and improvement of software development metrics.
• Help lead continuous learning and improvement for the Products and Product health related to quality and stability.
• Help lead product planning and roadmap with an agile mentality.
• Promote technology, innovation, values, and ways of working within the team and wider community.
• Active participation and contribution to Communities of Practice with a focus on positive momentum.
• Drive recruitment strategy and hiring plans.

Who You Are

• Your skills and experience will incPolyglot programmer, Java (preferred). A strong all-rounder with the knowledge and ability to select the right tool for the problem at hand.
• Deep experience with CDNs, DNS, Edge Computing and high-traffic applications.
• Experience or strong curiosity in building internal developer platforms.
• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure concepts and platforms such as Azure (preferred), AWS, GCP. With proven experience of operating cloud services at scale.
• Knowledge of SRE principles and best practices
• Solid understanding of observability and experience with monitoring platforms such as Dynatrace (preferred) or equivalent.
• Experience of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, ideally with experience of GitHub Actions.
• A passion for testing, ensuring solutions are delivered to a high-level of quality.

What’s In It For You

Working at M&S means being part of something bigger — helping deliver quality, value, and service to millions every day. We’re inclusive, fastmoving, and always evolving, with a strong sense of purpose and a focus on doing the right thing.

• 20% colleague discount on all M&S products and many third party brands
• Competitive holiday allowance with the option to buy more
• Discretionary performance based bonus schemes
• Strong pension and life assurance
• Tailored induction and continuous development support
• Exclusive perks and savings through our M&S Choices portal
• Market leading, family friendly policies (parental, adoption, neonatal leave)
• 24/7 wellbeing support including virtual GP and mental health services
• One paid volunteer day per year

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. Join us and make change happen.

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 work together to win together.

If you feel you'd benefit from any support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please don’t hesitate to let us know when completing your application. This information will be picked up by our team, so we can try and put steps in place to help you be at your best through this process.