Software Engineering Manager - AI Engineering

Marks and Spencer; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Marks & Spencer seeks an experienced Software Engineering Manager to lead the AI engineering platform for 200+ engineers across 30+ applications. You will shape the technical vision, build reusable pipelines and tooling, and guide teams toward delivering a premium customer and colleague experience.

Join a brand with a strong UK presence and drive develoment excellence through modern tooling, while mentoring senior engineers and aligning with strategic tech goals.

Qualifications

• Polyglot hands-on senior software engineer with leadership experience.
• Expert in AI coding tools and agentic technologies.
• Strong background in cloud and software architecture.

Responsibilities

• Be accountable for engineering excellence within your teams and drive operations and production reliability.
• Lead alignment with the technical strategy and craft it with the wider technology organisation.
• Act as a platform owner to enable digital products through data and customer centricity.

Skills

Senior software engineer

Polyglot

AI tools

Cloud architecture

DevOps mindset

Team leadership

Communication

Staff management

Tools

GitHub Actions

Copilot SDK

Agent frameworks

Kotlin

TypeScript

Job description

All the details

We're changing the way we do things, and putting industry leading innovation at the heart of how we operate; we need a stellar engineering team to make it happen. You'll be joining one of the most iconic brands in the UK on its most exciting cycle yet. We're more integrated and product led in our tech teams than ever before: learning, changing, and adapting constantly, with millions of people benefiting from your work every single day. You'll be joining the M&S Platform team as a Software Engineering Manager. Our mission is to streamline development at M&S for 200+ engineers and 30+ applications - covering both our customer-facing and colleague-facing applications. You will manage the team building the AI Engineering platform. You will support the team and help direct the technical vision for how we will build reusable pipelines, tooling, build plugins and frameworks that our many apps will harness to boost the developer experience, while contributing code every step of the way. We want to make M&S one of the best places for software development, target the latest tooling and enable our engineers to focus on building the best user experience so that they don't get held up by common engineering and continuous integration problems.

What You'll Do

• Being accountable for engineering excellence within your teams, from behaviours to operations, from technical direction to solution in production and from skills and growth to reputation.
• Cultivating self-management and accountability throughout the team via leadership, clear sense of purpose and thoughtful talent management.
• Lead alignment with the overarching technical strategy and working with the wider Technology organisation to craft it.
• Act as a platform owner, apply accurate product thinking to what is being built with a view to enable and empower as much as possible the digital product(s) that it supports through data and customer centricity, driving the related partner management.
• Collaborate with the entire engineering leadership, to make us think strategically, to ensure maximum alignment and to maintain a healthy ability to "think big" within their teams.
• Line management of supporting Staff and Senior Engineers, as well as driving recruitment and retention within the team.
• Act as custodian of OKRs within your hub.
• Supports our engineering communities to drive bar raising and strategic alignment, by creating the space and time within teams for the agenda of these communities to be progressed efficiently.
• When vendors are involved, the SEM is positioned as the key technical partner. They own it as a vital part of their platform with the same level of reliability and satisfaction as the in-house capabilities they build and run.

Who You Are

• Previous polyglot hands-on senior software engineer
• Excellent knowledge in AI coding tools and agentic technologies
• 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,
• Promoter of DevOps: you build it, you run it.
• Strong understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering
• Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical, and problem-solving skills
• Ability to lead and line manage senior engineers and technical partners to a desired outcome, without prescribing it.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different, including non-technical audiences.
• A servant-leadership mentality that is willing to take ownership of problems.
• Able to influence people at senior levels and from the highly technical to non-technical

Our Tech Stack

• GitHub Actions, Copilot SDK, and agentic workflows
• Model evaluation and quality measurement
• Secure AI integrations, identity, and access control
• Agent frameworks and orchestration patterns
• Cloud deployment and production operations
• TypeScript or Kotlin for production software development

What's In It For You