Principal Software Engineer - Integration in City of London

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you will 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 is an exciting time as we are 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 Principal Software Engineer to join us working across Enterprise Integration at M&S. As a technical leader, you will shape the strategy and engineering excellence of the integration fabric that connects our warehouse operations, retail systems, SAP landscape, and partner ecosystem. This is a transformative role; you will be leading the modernisation of our integration estate and building the cloud-native platform that will power M&S for the next decade.

Impact we are looking for:

• Define the future state - Shape the target integration platform architecture and the roadmap to get there.
• Simplify integration flows - Identify and eliminate unnecessary complexity in business-critical integration paths.
• Build platform capabilities - Create the patterns, frameworks, and self-service tooling that enable teams to integrate faster and safer.
• Improve reliability - Drive measurable improvements in incident rates and mean time to resolution.
• Strengthen security posture - Embed security controls across messaging, API, and data platform.

Key Accountabilities & Responsibilities:

• Lead technical excellence from design to operations and launch of core product features or strategic programmes.
• Drive technical direction and influence our overall strategy informing decisions on both Technology and Product investments as well as teams' setup.
• Champion Communities of Practice to help establish engineering excellence at M&S.
• Lead by example via contributions to our engineering ecosystem.
• Pioneer and promote methodologies like clean code and clean architecture.
• Advocate for engineering productivity, delivery quality and operational excellence through a continuous ecosystem.
• Drive DevOps practices to automate the Product development life cycle and ownership demeanour.
• Partner with both Engineering, Technology and Product leadership to ensure strategies align.
• Develop the best and mentor other senior engineering roles across the entire landscape.
• Promote effective innovation across all of engineering.
• Advocate and strategize for continuous industrialisation and product-minded tech capabilities.
• Inspire ideas to foster purpose and mastery to engineering teams, leading them towards autonomy and maturity.
• Amplify engineering teams by efficiently unblocking them with direction, leading upward, and establishing alignment.
• Raise the profile of MS Tech through public content and contribution/creation into open-source technology.
• Support recruitment, onboarding and internal and external brand outreach activities.

Tech Stack: M&S uses a variety of technologies across its Integration Estate. It spans IBM technologies (MQ, App Connect Enterprise, DataStage, DB2), Mule, Apigee, MongoDB, and Azure cloud services.

Essential Experience:

• Significant track record of strategic and innovative thinking, as well as execution and implementation.
• Specialist in clean code and implementation of design patterns for common problems.
• Depth of knowledge in Information Security, able to design, quality review and quality assure solutions and services with security controls embedded.
• Confident driving system design conversations, building systems characterised by high levels of risk, impact, and business or technical complexity.
• Able to analyse current processes, identify, and implement opportunities to optimise processes, and lead and develop a team of specialists to deliver service improvements.
• Experience of using a variety of methods of prototyping.
• Strong ability to influence industry-based models for the development of new technology applications.
• Strong understanding of quality assurance, testing quadrants and the testing pyramid, and how to apply them.
• Ability to lead senior engineers and technical customers to a desired outcome, without prescribing it.
• Authoritative skills at cloud computing (network, security, serverless, Kubernetes etc.) and automation.
• Experience with implementation of Observability and Reliability using market technologies (e.g.: New Relic).
• Good experience with Performance Engineering (load testing, derivations, tuning, core web vitals, page speed etc.).
• Expertise in reliability testing.
• Able to influence people at senior levels and from the highly technical to non-technical.

Desirable Experience:

• Previous software engineering community leadership experience.
• Professional presentation delivery at internal and external events.
• An ambition to be an open-source contributor, technology writer or speaker.
• Advocate and experience of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
• Advanced experience of DevOps: you build it, you run it.
• Cares about the business and the bigger picture with significant prior examples.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different audiences.
• A senior leadership mentality that is willing to take ownership.
• Demonstrable entrepreneurship in previous organisation(s).

What's in it for you:

• 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.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support.

M&S is ready to push boundaries to lead the retail industry into a greener, speedier, more inspiring digital era. That is why we are revolutionising how we work and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. There has 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 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.