Job Description

What you’ll do

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you will 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 engineering, it’s an exciting time as we are redefining ourselves into a digital first and innovation focused organisation, with the quality of our engineering team being a key differentiator.

We are seeking a passionate Staff Software Engineer to join our Store Operations C&H team. This team is responsible for building colleague facing applications and solutions that help manage stock keeping and stock movement operations within and across stores and distribution centres. Key responsibilities for this role are as follows:

• Software Development: Write, test, and debug code for complex features, distributed systems, or legacy migrations. Lead on designing and optimising deployment pipelines.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance and support on complex, high-impact projects that align with team objectives, ensuring successful delivery of software solutions, while tackling the hardest technical challenges for the team.
• Architecture and Design: Work across dependent teams, to lead the architecture, design, and development of large-scale projects, ensuring that software solutions align with business requirements, long-term technology strategy, and technology standards.
• Code Review: Review and provide constructive feedback on code submissions from team members, ensuring alignment to technical standards, maintainability, and high-quality software.
• Collaboration: Communicate and collaborate with a diverse range of stakeholders in various functions including product, delivery, architecture, infrastructure, senior management and external partners.
• Mentorship: Actively mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering an environment of continuous learning and growth, while participating in hiring processes and training engineers up to Staff standard.
• Operational Stability:  Demonstrate a production first attitude, continuously considering observability and maintaining Service Level Objectives, while delivering change at pace.
• Research & Innovation: Embrace emerging technologies and trends, and share insights with the organisation, while developing and maintaining the team technology roadmap and leading on the strategic approach to monitoring and maintaining production systems.
• Documentation: Create advanced system and operations documentation and deliver internal tech talks to share knowledge and best practices.
• Recruitment & Onboarding:  Assist with the recruitment and onboarding of new engineers into the organisation
• Closer to customers and colleagues: Being closer to our customers and colleagues is an integral part of how we do things at M&S. We regularly visit our stores, understand and experience how our applications are used by in store colleagues and how our customers benefit from the value we create. We take regular feedback and feed this back into our iterative development cycle.

Core Tech Expertise

• Java 21+
• Rest APIs with Micronaut and Spring Boot
• Relational database (Azure SQL/ SQL Server/ PostgreSQL)
• MongoDB (NoSQL database)
• Event processing with Kafka
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Azure pipelines
• Code quality with Sonar
• Microservice architecture
• Azure DevOps, Kubernetes, Docker
• Azure storage, Redis
• Observability Tools Dynatrace, New Relic
• Git, GitHub
• TDD, BDD
• Working experience of AI Coding assistants, AI agents

Valued experience in addition to Core

• Kotlin, React
• Security and performance testing and optimisation

Who you are

You will play a key role in driving our ambition to create a best-in-class software engineering team, environment, and culture. We are looking for people to join our community of engineers to drive this transformation, build a modern digital ecosystem using exciting technologies and do the best work of their careers.

• You will have strong experience in most of the core tech stack areas
• Expert understanding of software development practices
• Strong experience of DevOps: you build it, you run it, you support it.
• Advocate of Continuous integration and Continuous Delivery
• Experience with cloud engineering and highly scalable applications
• Great leadership and coaching skills with the ability to develop engineering colleagues

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 — disrupting, innovating, and leading our industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We’re transforming how we work together and offering our most exciting opportunities yet.

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 support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please let us know when completing your application so we can ensure you are set up for success.