Software Engineering Manager - Loyalty

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

Job summary

A leading retail company in London is seeking a Software Engineering Manager to lead a high-performing engineering team. You'll oversee project delivery, build robust solutions, and foster a culture of collaboration and innovation. The ideal candidate has extensive software engineering experience, strong leadership skills, and knowledge of modern tech stacks including Java and Azure. This role offers attractive benefits and the opportunity to work in a dynamic environment focused on digital transformation.

Benefits

20% colleague discount

Competitive holiday allowance

Discretionary bonus schemes

Strong pension and life assurance

Tailored induction and training

Family-friendly policies

24/7 wellbeing support

Paid volunteer day

Qualifications

• Previous polyglot hands-on senior software engineer.
• Experience working on highly scalable software solutions.
• Extensive background in software engineering.

Responsibilities

• Manage and mentor a high-performing software engineering team.
• Oversee planning and execution of software projects.
• Establish quality standards and maintain software systems.

Skills

Team Management

Agile Delivery

Technical Leadership

Quality Assurance

System Design

Tools

Java

React

Azure Cloud

SQL Server

Job description

Summary

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you'll 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 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 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.

All the details

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

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

• Team Management: Build, mentor, and manage a high‑performing software engineering team. Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement within the team. Facilitate communication and collaboration among team members. Ensure budgets, people and resource allocation, and workload balance across projects.
• Agile Delivery: Oversee the planning, execution, and delivery of software projects, ensuring alignment with business objectives and timelines. Monitor project progress, risks, and dependencies, taking corrective action when necessary. Work closely with product management, design, programme management, and others to define project scope, goals, and deliverables.
• Technical Leadership: Drive the adoption of standards, and methodologies for software development. Provide technical guidance and support to engineering teams for complex projects. Evaluate and recommend new technologies, tools, and platforms to improve the engineering process and software quality. Work with senior engineers to develop the team's technical roadmap and support the product management team to prioritise it against the commercial roadmap.
• Quality Assurance and Maintenance: Establish and enforce quality standards, ensuring software products meet performance, reliability, and usability requirements. Oversee the maintenance and support of existing software systems, ensuring prompt resolution of issues and bugs.

Who You Are

• Previous polyglot hands‑on senior 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.
• Promoter of DevOps: you build it, you run it.

Tech Stack

M&S uses a variety of technologies including:

• Java, Spring, SpringBOOT, Micronaut
• React, Next.js, Typescript, Angular
• Azure Cloud, Kubernetes, Dynatrace (observability)
• SQL Server, MongoDB
• Ignite, Redis

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.