Software Engineering Manager

We're changing the way we do things, and putting industry leading innovation at the heart of how we operate; we need a stellar engineering team to make it happen. You'll be joining one of the most iconic brands in the UK on its most exciting cycle yet. We're more integrated and product led in our tech teams than ever before: learning, changing, and adapting constantly, with millions of customers and colleagues benefiting from reliable, modern in-store technology every single day.

As a Software Engineering Manager within Store Payments & Infrastructure, you will lead teams running and evolving business-critical store systems, ensuring they are reliable in live trading environments. You will work across multiple engineering teams and third-party partners to maximise delivery outcomes in a domain built on complex integrations with store hardware and external systems, improving how these platforms are designed, tested and operated at scale. Our mission is to improve reliability and delivery across in-store payments and store technology systems. You will manage a team responsible for delivering business strategy such as optimising payments, customer experience and reducing shrinkage while remaining hands-on where needed to support delivery and resolve complex issues.

Responsibilities

• Being accountable for engineering excellence within your teams, from behaviours to operations, from technical direction to solution in production and from skills and growth to reputation, particularly in live trading environments where reliability is critical.
• Cultivating self-management and accountability throughout the team via leadership, clear sense of purpose and thoughtful talent management, ensuring teams can effectively own and operate business-critical store systems.
• Lead alignment with the overarching technical strategy and work with the wider Technology organisation to craft it, ensuring it is achievable within the constraints of the store estate and legacy platforms.
• Act as a platform owner, applying product thinking to what is being built to enable and empower store systems through improved reliability, scalability and developer productivity, while driving effective partner and vendor management.
• Collaborate with the entire engineering leadership to think strategically, ensure alignment, and maintain the ability to “think big” while operating in a domain that requires safe, incremental modernisation.
• Line management of supporting Staff and Senior Engineers, as well as driving recruitment and retention within the team, building capability in operating and evolving complex, production-critical systems.
• Drive objectives and outcomes associated with our engineering performance framework related to systems' reliability, speed of change and quality.
• When vendors are involved, act as the key technical partner, owning third-party delivery, setting the same expectations with the vendor in terms of reliability, speed of change and quality as with any core part of the system.
• When required, drive the modernisation and plan ahead the evolution of the Software delivery Lifecycle, ensuring technical debt is continuously identified, prioritised and reduced alongside delivery, enabling safer, faster and more predictable change across the store estate.

As a result, the team focuses on reliability, consistency and incremental modernisation, reducing technical debt while enabling safe, scalable change across the store estate.

Technologies & Practices

• REST APIs with Micronaut Spring Boot and JUnit
• Event processing with Kafka
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Azure pipelines
• Microservice architecture, Azure DevOps, Kubernetes, Docker
• Azure storage, Redis and Observability tools Dynatrace
• Integration-driven development and testing across multiple systems and vendors
• End-to-end and environment-based testing, ensuring solutions are robust in real store conditions
• Operating within a landscape that combines modern platforms with legacy systems and hardware dependencies

Qualifications

• Previous polyglot hands-on senior software engineer, with experience working across complex, production-critical systems
• Excellent knowledge in modern web, mobile or backend technologies, with the ability to apply them pragmatically within legacy and hardware-integrated environments
• Extensive background in software engineering with several years of experience across a variety of systems and technologies, including large-scale, live operational environments
• Experience building and leading teams of highly skilled, senior software engineers that deliver high-quality software in high-availability, customer-impacting systems
• Excellent understanding of system design, software architecture, cloud, and software engineering standard methodologies, with the ability to balance modern approaches with existing estate constraints
• Promoter of DevOps: you build it, you run it, with strong ownership of systems in production
• Strong understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering, particularly in live environments where failures directly impact customers and trading
• Experience modernising legacy systems and managing technical debt, driving incremental improvement alongside delivery
• Strong experience working in Agile environments, leading and contributing to delivery practices such as sprint planning, stand-ups, backlog refinement and retrospectives to maintain consistent delivery momentum
• Good understanding of end-to-end solution lifecycles, from discovery and design through to testing, release and operation, including deployment across large-scale store or infrastructure estates
• Experience working across distributed teams, including onshore, nearshore and offshore models, ensuring consistent delivery quality and alignment across multiple workstreams
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, able to engage effectively across a range of audiences, from commercial discussions on priorities and investment through to detailed technical conversations with engineering teams
• Able to make clear prioritisation and trade-off decisions, balancing short-term risk and delivery needs with longer-term platform sustainability and modernisation goals
• Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical, and problem-solving skills
• Ability to lead and line manage senior engineers and technical partners to a desired outcome, without prescribing it, including working effectively with third-party engineering teams
• Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different, including non-technical audiences
• Customer and team centric mentality that is willing to take ownership of problems and outcomes

We're an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and always evolving business built on core values. 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.

Benefits

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Family friendly policies to support life's most important landmarks including parental leave, neo-natal support.