Head of Software Engineering - Personalisation

Marks and Spencer; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading retail company in London seeks a Head of Software Engineering to drive technology strategy within their Personalisation team. You will lead Engineering Managers, influence enterprise-wide practices, and ensure high standards of security and performance. The ideal candidate will have significant experience in software engineering, possess strong leadership skills, and be well-versed in cloud technologies and modern frameworks. This role offers the chance to innovate and enhance customer experience through technology.

Benefits

20% colleague discount

Competitive holiday allowance

Discretionary bonus schemes

Strong pension and life assurance

Tailored induction and training

Market-leading family policies

24/7 wellbeing support

One paid volunteer day annually

Qualifications

• Significant hands-on experience as a polyglot senior software engineer.
• Experience leading large product areas with multiple teams.
• Knowledge of Personalisation, Recommendation and Search concepts.

Responsibilities

• Lead and inspire Engineering Managers and teams.
• Drive technical excellence and modern engineering practices.
• Own Product Group outcomes and health.

Skills

Technical leadership

Hands-on software engineering

Cloud infrastructure

Java

Python

React

Job description

Overview

Summary We are seeking a visionary Head of Software Engineering to lead our Personalisation team. Reporting to the Senior Head of Software Engineering, you will play a pivotal role in shaping our technology strategy, influencing enterprise-wide engineering practices, and ensuring our capabilities meet the highest standards of security, compliance, and performance.

All the details As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you'll be joining a well-loved historic brand, working on solutions that serves 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.

We are seeking a passionate Head of Software Engineering 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, Data Science and Delivery teams you will deliver sophisticated and robust solutions to solve daring problems for our customers and colleagues.

You'll be joining the leadership for the Personalisation product group, who are responsible for our on-site and in-app personalisation, search and recommendations capabilities. The teams in this area work on some of the most innovative features in M&S, e.g. 1:1 Personalised Search and AI Stylist. Teams within this product group are highly cross-functional, blending engineering, data science, product, design and delivery. You'll help deliver the vision of 1:1 personalisation across our estate and help make M&S feel like it was merchandised specifically for each customer individually.

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.

Team and scope

2-8 Engineering Managers (Engineering Managers are responsible for 5-9 Engineers each).

4-8 Squads in a strategic Product Group (50-75 Engineers)

What you will be doing

The Head of Software Engineering role is the embodiment of solving problems through technology with key responsibilities as follows:

• Lead, develop and inspire Engineering Managers and teams, fostering a strong learning culture, high-quality engineering standards, and clear development and talent strategies.
• Partner closely with Product, Delivery and Technology leadership to shape strategy, prioritise roadmaps, solve complex problems, and maximise value to colleagues and customers.
• Drive technical excellence and modern engineering practices, including DevOps, clean code, automation, architecture design, and the adoption of standard frameworks, policies, and North Star principles.
• Own Product Group outcomes and health, setting OKRs, ensuring reliability, quality, SLI/SLO performance, and full operational support across products.
• Champion innovation, continuous improvement and agile ways of working, encouraging experimentation, pragmatism, and commercially sound delivery.
• Build and scale high-performing teams and communities, leading recruitment, onboarding, coaching, Communities of Practice, and contributing to wider engineering brand and culture.

Tech stack

• M&S uses a variety of technologies including
• React, Next.js, Typescript
• Java
• Kotlin
• Python
• Swift
• GraphQL Federation
• Cloud: Azure
• While M&S is principally a Java environment, the Personalisation group has a mix of Python and Java teams.

What you will need to have

• Significant hands-on experience as a polyglot senior software engineer, with strong expertise across front-end, back-end, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and modern development frameworks.
• Leading large product areas with 5+ teams
• Knowledge of Personalisation, Recommendation and Search concepts and their relation to e-commerce. Ideally you would have awareness of the current state-of-the-art.
• Proven ability to design and evolve complex systems, with deep knowledge of software architecture, system design, cloud-native patterns, and engineering standard methodologies.
• Strong experience delivering, operating and scaling software at Product Group level and above, including building, leading and hiring senior engineering teams.
• Advanced DevOps, testing and reliability engineering expertise, embracing CI/CD, automation, observability, and a you build it, you run it ownership model.
• Experience working closely with Product and Data Science teams, translating ambiguous requirements into robust technical solutions within customer-centric environments.
• Technically credible people leader and servant leader, able to line manage and influence senior engineers and engineering managers, drive technical outcomes, and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What's In It For You

Working at M&S means being part of something bigger - helping to deliver quality, value and service to millions of customers every day. We're inclusive, fast-moving and always evolving, with a strong sense of purpose and a focus on doing the right thing.

Here are just a few of the benefits that make working here even more rewarding:

• 20% colleague discount on all M&S products and many third-party brands for you and someone in your household, available once you've completed your probation
• Competitive holiday allowance with the option to buy more
• Discretionary bonus schemes linked to your performance and ours
• Strong pension and life assurance to help plan for the future
• Tailored induction and training to support your development from day one
• Exclusive perks and savings through our M&S Choices portal
• Market-leading family policies, including parental, adoption and neonatal leave
• 24/7 wellbeing support, including virtual GP access and mental health services
• One paid volunteer day a year to support a cause that matters to you

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.

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