Staff Software Engineer - Mobile Apps

Marks and Spencer; City Of London; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A renowned retail brand in London is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Mobile App Platform team. You will lead software development, provide technical leadership, and mentor engineers. The ideal candidate should have advanced Android development skills and a passion for enhancing the developer experience. This role offers a collaborative environment with strong focus on innovation and ethical values.

Benefits

20% staff discount

Competitive holiday allowance

Discretionary bonus schemes

Strong pension and life assurance

24/7 wellbeing support

Qualifications

• Experience with authoring Gradle Plugins.
• Comfortable solving complex problems without defined solutions.
• Enthusiastic about writing automated tests for application and pipeline code.

Responsibilities

• Write, test, and debug code for complex features and distributed systems.
• Provide technical guidance and support on high-impact projects.
• Lead the development of architectural solutions for large-scale projects.

Skills

Self-driven individual

Advanced knowledge of Android application development

Capable of using or building new tooling

Passion for boosting the Android developer experience

Experienced with build + runtime observability

Passionate about knowledge sharing

Tools

Kotlin

Java

Gradle Build System

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Job description

Summary

As part of the M\u00c3\u00b4S 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. You'll be joining the M\u00c3\u00b4S Mobile App Platform team as a Staff Software Engineer. Our mission is to streamline native mobile development at M\u00c3\u00b4S for our 40+ engineers and 10+ mobile applications - covering both our flagship apps, with more than 5 million monthly active users, and our colleague-facing apps that power 100s of store processes and make our colleagues' lives easier.

All the details

We are seeking a passionate Staff Software Engineer who will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtfully and operate with excellence. Being creative, curious, and fearless, 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 teams you will deliver elegant and robust solutions to solve complex problems for our customers and colleagues.

You will 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\u00c3\u00b4S one of the best places for mobile app 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 Android engineering and continuous integration problems.

What You'll Do

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Software Development: Write, test, and debug code for complex features, distributed systems, or legacy migrations. Lead on designing and optimising deployment pipelines.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance and support on complex, high-impact projects that align with team objectives, ensuring successful delivery of software solutions, while tackling the hardest technical challenges for the team.
• Architecture and Design: Lead the development of architectural and design solutions for large-scale projects, ensuring that software solutions align with business requirements, long-term technology strategy, and technology standards.
• Code Review: Review and provide constructive feedback on code submissions from team members, ensuring alignment to technical standards, maintainability, and high-quality software.
• Collaboration: Communicate and collaborate with a diverse range of collaborators, including senior management and external partners, while leading or starting communities of practice.
• Mentorship: Actively mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering an environment of continuous learning and growth, while participating in hiring processes and training engineers up to Staff standard.
• Operational Stability: Demonstrate a production first attitude, continuously considering observability and maintaining Service Level Objectives, while delivering change at pace.
• Research & Innovation: Embrace emerging technologies and trends, and share insights with the organisation, while developing and maintaining the team technology roadmap and leading on the strategic approach to monitoring and maintaining production systems.
• Documentation: Write advanced system and operations documentation and perform advanced internal tech talks to share knowledge and best practices.
• Recruitment & Onboarding: Assist with the recruitment and onboarding of new engineers into the organisation

Who You Are

Your skills and experience will include:

• Self-driven individual comfortable solving complex problems without defined solutions
• Someone who can direct the Android platform technical vision alongside their product manager
• Advanced knowledge of Android application development and the Gradle build systems
• Capable of using or building new tooling to optimise developer experience
• Experienced with build + runtime observability
• Passion for boosting the Android developer experience using both stock + custom tooling
• Experience with optimising incremental compile time
• Experience with authoring Gradle Plugins
• Enthusiastic about writing automated tests, for both application code and pipeline code
• Passionate about knowledge sharing, presenting technical concepts to both specific and broad audiences
• Passionate about inner source, open source and community

Tech Stack

M\u00c3\u00b4S Front-end teams use a variety of technologies including:

• Kotlin / Java
• Gradle Build System
• Android Build Tooling
• Github Action CI/CD Workflows
• GitHub + GitHub Actions
• Bash
• Terraform
• JUnit 4 + 5, Kotlin Test
• Dynatrace Observability

What\u2019s In It For You

Working at M\u00c3\u00b4S 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\u00c3\u00b4S 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\u00c3\u00b4S 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.