Software Engineering Manager - Loyalty

Marks and Spencer; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A historic retail company is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead a team in creating innovative software solutions. The role involves technical leadership, architectural decision-making, and team growth. Ideal candidates will possess strong leadership skills and a deep understanding of multiple technologies including Java, Kotlin, and cloud solutions, alongside the ability to foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. This position offers competitive benefits in an evolving digital environment.

Benefits

20% colleague discount

Attractive annual bonus

Generous pension scheme

Volunteer day

Access to virtual GP

Wide range of training schemes

Qualifications

• Proven experience in software engineering leadership roles.
• Strong understanding of software architecture and cloud technologies.
• Ability to coach and develop engineering talent.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and architectural decisions for software solutions.
• Establish quality standards and lead incident resolution.
• Drive innovation and manage the technical roadmap.

Skills

Empathy in leadership

Experience in polyglot environments

Scalable software solutions

Excellent system design understanding

Coaching and mentoring

Tools

Java

Kotlin

GraphQL Federation

GitHub

Kubernetes

Azure

Dynatrace

Job description

Overview

Summary

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.

All the details

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.

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. The M&S Loyalty Offers team is responsible for building tools to integrate new personalized Offers and Mission Based Rewards into the customer experience. We work with data scientists to allocate & personalize offers, we work closely with the core loyalty platform team to progress offers and missions based on customer activity & purchases.

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

The team uses the following core technologies:

• 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)

What's in it for you

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.

Here are some of the benefits we offer that make working for M&S just that little bit more special

• 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

Everyone's welcome

M&S is ready to push boundaries to lead the retail industry into a greener, speedier, more inspiring digital era. That's why we're revolutionising how we work and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. Marks & Spencer aims to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make change happen.

We are committed to an active Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunities Policy, which starts with our recruitment and selection process, and we are happy to talk flexible working.

If you consider yourself to require reasonable adjustments to any part of our recruitment process, we invite you to share those requirements with us when completing your application. We will make every effort to ensure your needs are met to provide a fair and transparent process of assessment.

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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