Staff Software Engineer - Selling Experience

Why Digital & Tech at M&S?

We're changing the way we do things, and putting industry leading innovation at the heart of how we operate; we need a stellar engineering team to make it happen. You'll be joining one of the most iconic brands in the UK on its most exciting cycle yet. We're more integrated and product led in our tech teams than ever before: learning, changing, and adapting constantly, with millions of people benefiting from your work every single day.

We have a genuine ambition to become engineering first, building and operating an elite digital platform. We are looking for people to join our community of engineers to support this transformation, build a modern digital ecosystem.

What you’ll do

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Build and maintain high‑quality, reliable software and own it with automation in the cloud, embracing a "you build it, you run it" mindset.
• Lead delivery of complex backlog items and domain-level initiatives across teams, from design to production, with smooth rollout and minimal operational disruption.
• Shape long‑term architecture in partnership with Engineering managers, Principal Engineers, and align it with broader platform goals and technology standards.
• Write, review, and release high‑test‑coverage code that meets service objectives and demonstrates strong observability.
• Coach and mentor engineers through pairing, reviews, and technical feedback, enabling a culture of continuous learning.
• Contribute to team OKRs and take ownership of team objectives, as well as support product planning and roadmap with an agile mindset.
• Partner closely with Product and Design, with teams such as Data, Security and Trading to define meaningful customer outcomes, improving application at scale.
• Drive change by championing secure coding, innovation, platform capability, and sustainable ways of working within the team and wider engineering community. Develop and refine M&S engineering standards ensuring they’re understood, adopted, and continuously improved.
• Actively contribute to Communities of Practice, hiring, onboarding, and represent Selling Experience in engineering‑wide strategic discussions.
• Actively participate in the on-call support rota, supporting and improving operational stability, observability, performance and cost-effective design.

Who you are

Your skills and experience will include:

• You proactively identify architectural or operational debt in the team domain and own initiatives to reduce it, such as refactoring services, improving observability dashboards, or streamlining deployment paths.
• You routinely perform system health reviews, viewing SEO reports, and ensuring your domain meets or exceeds SLA and SLO targets.
• You lead architectural spikes or proofs-of-concept (for example, evaluating GraphQL Mesh federation changes or experimenting with ISR caching patterns in Next.js) and decide what to surface as best practices for the wider org.
• You design and own internal tools or frameworks, such as reusable libraries or domain‑specific API contracts, that simplify work for other teams and raise consistency levels across squads.
• You regularly host internal demos, tech talks, or brown‑bag sessions, passing on lessons from incidents, optimizations, or platform enhancements to upskill engineers across the broader engineering community.
• You coordinate with product, data, and experience teams to validate hypotheses via experimentation frameworks (Optimizely), analyzing results to guide subsequent development priorities.
• You partner with on-call engineers during major incidents, leading post‑mortems, surfacing root causes, and driving follow‑up remediation and improvements in resilience.
• You drive cross-team coordination, for example, aligning with adjacent teams on shared components, and mediating dependencies to maintain velocity.
  

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.