Staff Software Engineer

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. 

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 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.  

What you'll do 

The Staff Software Engineer role is the embodiment of ‘solving problems through technology’ with key responsibilities as follows:  

• 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 supervising and maintaining production systems.  

• Documentation: Write sophisticated system and operations documentation and perform advanced internal tech talks to share knowledge and standard processes.  

• Recruitment & Onboarding: Assist with the recruitment and onboarding of new engineers into the organisation 

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Who you are 

• 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 

Tech stack 

M&S Back-end teams use a variety of technologies including: Java, Kafka, GraphQL, Azure Cloud, Kubernetes, GitHub actions and Observability Tools such as New Relic and Dynatrace 

Desirable experience 

• Knowledge of Software approaches like Domain Driven Design 

• Cares about the business and the bigger picture 

• Good communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different audiences 

• A leadership mentality that is willing to take responsibility 

• An ambition to be an open-source contributor, technology writer or speaker  

Works closely with 

As a member of M&S Software Engineering, you’ll also work with and learn from other engineers and specialists in the organisation through Business Platforms, Product Portfolios, Product Groups, other teams and Communities of Practice.  

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. There’s never been a better time to be part of our team. Marks & Spencer aims to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make an immediate impact.  

We’re an in-person business and have core collaboration days in our Support Centre each week. For most teams, this is 3 working days where we come together to collaborate, innovate, and serve our customers brilliantly.  

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.  

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