Azure Microservices Architect & Technical Strategy Lead

Marks and Spencer; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

20% colleague discount on all M&S

Competitive holiday allowance

Discretionary bonus schemes

Strong pension and life assurance

Tailored induction and training

Exclusive perks and savings

Market-leading family policies

24/7 wellbeing support

One paid volunteer day

Job summary

Marks & Spencer is seeking a Principal Engineer, the most senior individual contributor in engineering, to set technical direction and lead architectural decisions aligned with business strategy. You will mentor teams and drive secure, resilient, maintainable solutions across the Azure-based microservices and integration estate.

In this role you will partner with HR, Payroll and Product stakeholders to balance technology investments with people processes, whilst guiding API design, data flows

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in system design, architecture and technical leadership across complex, business-critical domains.
• Proven experience modernising Azure-based distributed or microservices architectures.
• Strong knowledge of APIs, asynchronous messaging, SaaS integration, observability, security, resilience and continuous delivery.
• Understanding of People and Labour domains, including areas such as core HR, colleague lifecycle, payroll, absence, time and attendance, labour forecasting or workforce scheduling.
• Strong mentoring, influencing and stakeholder management skills, with experience handling sensitive colleague and workforce data.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for the People & Labour sub-domains, with a particular focus on modernising Azure microservices, integrations and data flows.
• Lead system design and architecture across teams, products and enterprise platforms, guiding decisions on APIs, event-driven architecture, SaaS integration and build-versus-buy approaches.
• Mentor engineering managers, staff engineers and key engineering talent, fostering technical excellence, continuous improvement and high hiring standards.
• Partner with HR, Payroll, Workforce Management, Product, Architecture, Security and Data stakeholders to align technology and business objectives and communicate technical trade-offs effectively.
• Drive operational excellence through improved observability, resilience, incident management, CI/CD, developer experience and the adoption of AI across the product and software development lifecycle.

Skills

System design

Technical leadership

Azure

APIs & Integration

Security & resilience

Observability

People & Labour domain knowledge

Tools

Azure

Oracle HCM

Blue Yonder Workforce Management

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Marks & Spencer is seeking a Principal Engineer, the most senior individual contributor in engineering, to set technical direction and lead architectural decisions aligned with business strategy. You will mentor teams and drive secure, resilient, maintainable solutions across the Azure-based microservices and integration estate.

In this role you will partner with HR, Payroll and Product stakeholders to balance technology investments with people processes, whilst guiding API design, data flows