Staff Software Engineer - Platform Engineering

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

Job summary

A leading retail company is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join their London team. The role involves providing technical leadership, designing and maintaining web applications, and collaborating with product teams. Ideal candidates will have extensive experience across the tech stack, strong leadership capabilities, and a commitment to software excellence. Employees enjoy a range of benefits including discounts, competitive holidays, and wellbeing support.

Benefits

20% discount on M&S products

Competitive holiday allowance

Discretionary bonus schemes

Strong pension and life assurance

Tailored induction and training

Exclusive perks and savings

Market-leading family policies

24/7 wellbeing support

One paid volunteer day annually

Qualifications

• Strong experience in most of the tech stack areas.
• Expert understanding of software development practices.
• Proficiency with Test Driven Development and non-functional testing.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Front-end development

Back-end development

Git

Test Driven Development

Behaviour Driven Development

DevOps

Cloud engineering

Leadership skills

Micro-frontends knowledge

Developer productivity frameworks

Tools

React

Next.js

GraphQL

Azure Cloud

New Relic

Dynatrace

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 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

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.

The Web Platform is a set of opinionated tools (Next.js, TypeScript, NX, Playwright, Jest, GitHub Actions) used by anyone building web apps at M&S. We focus on productivity metrics, developer satisfaction, and lead time to change, to make sure every engineer at M&S is as effective as they can be.

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:

• You’ll have strong experience in most of the tech stack areas, from front-end through to back-end
• Expert understanding of software development practices
• Solid expertise with distributed version controls systems like Git
• Proficiency with Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development and non-functional testing
• Strong experience of DevOps: you build it, you run it
• Advocate of Continuous integration and Continuous Delivery
• Experience with cloud engineering and highly scalable applications
• Proficiency of documenting software design technical decisions and recommendations
• Great leadership and coaching skills with the ability to develop engineering colleagues
• Knowledge of modern front-end techniques - edge computing, micro-frontends, server components
• Experience with developer productivity frameworks such as DORA and SPACE

Tech Stack

M&S Front-end teams use a variety of technologies including:

• React (Next.js / Typescript),
• GraphQL Federation
• Azure Cloud
• Observability Tools such as New Relic and Dynatrace

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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