Software Engineering Manager

Role Accountability

We are looking for a passionate Software Engineering Manager who can champion engineering excellence and lead teams that design, develop and operate core parts of the M&S Store Operations.

A role within M&S Software Engineering means you’ll be joining a well-loved historic brand, working on a digital platform that serves millions of committed 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 into a digital first and engineering-led organisation, with the quality of our engineering team being a key differentiator.

M&S Software Engineering is a friendly, passionate and humble team, where everyone has a voice and is encouraged to contribute ideas and talk straight. You’ll get the opportunity to learn and grow, take true ownership, influence our technology and help us solve exciting problems for our customers and colleagues.

We have a genuine ambition to become engineering first, building and operating a special digital platform. We are looking for people to join our community of engineers to support this transformation, build a modern digital ecosystem using exciting technologies, participate in our hackathons and do the best work of their careers!

Store Operations

Working as part of a domain services team you'll be building out new enterprise business capabilities. Encapsulating business logic and ensuring the technology is framed towards answering domain questions you will enable products all over the business while decoupling systems and teams.

• Lead the teams and people in a way that results in the build of high-quality and reliable software
• Own the engineering excellence of their teams e.g. behaviours, operations and technical quality
• Line manage and develop engineers to ensure they have the right skills, career growth plans and demeanour
• Develop solid and effective relationships between technology, product, operations and other business areas
• Balance sets of priorities that maximises time to market without compromising on long-term strategy
• Represent M&S Software Engineering as an ambassador that promotes an authoritative reputation of the area
• Foster self-management and accountability at the team level through servant leadership
• Responsible for their area’s alignment with the overarching technical strategy
• Work with the wider Technology function to shape the technical strategy where vital
• Act as platform owner and apply solid product thinking about what is being built
• Responsible for the OKR process in their area, ensuring a healthy mix of commercial and technical objectives
• Collaborates with the rest of engineering leadership to develop and deliver critical initiatives
• Supports Tribes, Fellowships and Orchestras with a focus on positive momentum and demonstrable value
• Lead recruitment activities, new starter onboarding and team composition planning
• Act as technical partner when third-party vendors are involved, owning it as they would in-house solutions
• Be hands on technically where vital
• Demonstrate and champion pragmatism in terms of commercial delivery and software quality
• Assist the team members that support the technical platforms during out of hours

You’ll be working closely with Software Engineers, Product Managers, Delivery Managers, external partners and Head of Departments to collaboratively solve problems and plan for the future of M&S. You will also be interacting with other specialists such as Data Scientists, UX/UI Designers and analytics experts.

As a member of M&S Software Engineering, you’ll also have the opportunity to work with and learn from other engineers and specialists in the organisation via our teams (Squads), sets of squads (Tribes), communities of practices (Fellowships), strategic assemblies (Orchestras) or special interest groups (Guilds).

• Consistently leading the delivery of high-quality reliable software
• Retention levels of Engineers and overall Tribe and Fellowship happiness
• Effectiveness of onboarding for new starters
• Upskilling of direct line reports so that significant career growth is seen
• Always demonstrating the company’s ‘M&S Way’ values
• Completion of personal development plans and objectives
• Positive feedback from colleagues and seen widely as a confident leader
• Leading and contributing to Squads, Tribes, Fellowships and Orchestras
• Proficiency in influencing senior colleagues

• Java
• Java Spring Boot
• Python
• GraphQL
• Cloud – Azure
• CI/CD - Azureops and GitHub Actions
• Automation - Selenium and Playwright

Critical Experiences

• Solid background in software engineering with many years’ experience in a variety of systems and technologies
• Good knowledge in all stack areas, from front-end through to back-end
• Commercial experience working on multiple different types and scale of systems
• Proven track record in delivering, operating, leading, hiring and pivoting
• Experience building and leading teams of highly skilled software engineers that deliver high-quality software
• Strong understanding of system design, software architecture, cloud, and software engineering standard methodologies,
• Expert knowledge and advocate for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
• Expert in Agile, lean and DevOps (you build it, you run it)
• Good understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering
• Highly organised and able to manage multiple work streams, manage partners and expectations
• Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical and problem-solving skills

• A passion for all aspects of software engineering
• A true servant leader with a ‘people first’ attitude
• Ability to self-start, self-manage and has a clear sense of purpose
• Displays high levels of conscientiousness, tenacity and pride in their work
• A leadership and ‘leads by example’ attitude who naturally takes responsibility
• Naturally puts themselves forward for exciting tasks
• Able to influence people at all levels and from the highly technical to non-technical
• Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different audiences
• Humbleness, humility and honesty
• Cares about the business and the bigger picture
• Very delivery focused and takes pride in being timely, and delivering a quality product
• Is a driving force in any engineering community

#LI-ZF1

M&S is ready to push boundaries to lead the retail industry into a greener, speedier, more inspiring digital era. That’s why we’re revolutionising how we work and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. There’s never been a better time to be part of our team. Marks & Spencer aims to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make an immediate impact.

We are committed to an active Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunities Policy, which starts with our recruitment and selection process, and we are happy to talk flexible working.

If you consider yourself to require reasonable adjustments to any part of our recruitment process, we invite you to share those requirements with us when completing your application. We will make every effort to ensure your needs are met to provide a fair and transparent process of assessment.