Software Engineering Manager - Loyalty

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.

Job purpose

We are seeking a passionate Software Engineering Manager who will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtfully and operate with excellence. Being creative, curious, and confident, you will be an integral part of our empowered, self managing, multi disciplinary engineering teams - designing, building, releasing, and maintaining products. Working as an equal partner with the Product and Delivery you will deliver sophisticated and robust solutions to solve daring problems for our customers.

What you'll do

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Software Development & Architecture: Responsible for design and architectural decisions, developing scalable and distributed systems, and driving legacy migrations. Focused on optimizing deployment pipelines to enhance efficiency and reliability.
• Quality, Stability & Standards: Establish quality standards to meet performance, reliability, and maintainability of the systems. With a strong production first mindset, drive observability, maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and ensure efficient incident resolution. Oversee the maintenance of existing systems, ensuring continuous improvements and prompt resolution of issues.
• Agile Delivery & Collaboration: Working closely with product, design, and programme management, you will lead the engineering delivery aligning to the business objectives. Collaboration will be key as you engage with senior leadership, cross functional teams, and external partners to drive strategy and execution.
• Technical Leadership: You will provide technical direction on high impact projects, tackling engineering challenges within the team. Engage in code reviews, ensuring high standards, maintainability, and alignment with best practices. Foster a culture of continuous improvement, technical excellence, and shared learning across the team.
• Hiring, Team Growth & Management: Manage team structure, budgets, resource allocation across projects. Hiring and onboarding new engineers, ensuring a seamless transition into the team. Coaching and mentoring engineers at all levels, tailoring your approach to help them grow into more senior technical and leadership roles.
• Technology Strategy & Knowledge Sharing: Driving innovation and continuous improvement across the team, managing technology roadmap, ensuring long term strategic alignment. Lead on documentation efforts and internal tech talks, sharing knowledge and best practices to strengthen the technical community.

Tech stack

• Java / Kotlin
• GraphQL Federation
• Github
• Kubernetes
• Cloud: Azure
• Observability: Dynatrace

Who you are

Your skills and experience:

• Recognize that great engineering is as much about people as it is about technical expertise and lead with empathy
• Previous polyglot hands on lead software engineer
• Experience working on highly scalable software solutions across web or backend
• Extensive background in software engineering with several years' experience in a variety of systems and technologies
• Experience building and leading teams of highly skilled, senior software engineers that deliver high quality software.
• Excellent understanding of system design, software architecture, cloud, and software engineering standard methodologies,
• Great leadership and coaching skills with the ability to develop engineering colleagues

Desirable experience

• Knowledge of Software approaches like Domain Driven Design
• Previous software engineering community leadership experience
• Presentation delivery at internal and external event.
• An ambition to be an open source contributor, technology writer or speaker.
• Advanced experience with cloud engineering
• Demonstrable entrepreneurship in previous organisation(s)

Benefits

Being a part of M&S is exactly that - becoming a part and playing your part. We're an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and always evolving business built on core values.

• 20% Colleague discount on most things from furniture, fashion and food.
• A first class welcome to M&S with a tailored induction and a wide range of training schemes to help with your learning and development. Having options to progress is something we're proud of at M&S.
• Attractive annual bonus, based on company performance and personal objectives.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
• Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices website. Including GymSave - that offers up to 25% off Gym Memberships and the option to become an M&S Shareholder using our ShareSave & ShareBuy Schemes
• Charity Volunteer Day - A paid day away from work to support your chosen charity.
• A very generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance
• Every colleague at M&S has access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support - this includes access to our 24/7 Virtual GP, PAM Assist to support you & your family as well as many other schemes

Inclusion

M&S is 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. We're an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers.