Principal Software Engineer - Food in London

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you'll 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'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 Principal Software Engineer to join our Food & International Food category, where you will be a driving force behind the modernisation of mission‑critical systems for M&S, as we scale. As a technical leader, you will be collaborating with multiple cross‑functional teams to design, build, and maintain the software that powers us every day. Your expertise will help us create a best‑in‑class engineering environment while ensuring our systems are robust, scalable, and reusable across our multiple warehouses.

Reports to: Senior Head of Software Engineering

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:

• Java, Micronaut, PL/SQL
• ReactJS, Next.js
• Azure Cloud, Dynatrace (observability)
• Mule, Kafka, MQ
• Blue Yonder Dispatcher

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, you can 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. You know how to share methodologies and can mentor others. You look at strategic service design end to end.
• Strong ability to influence industry‑based models for the development of new technology applications. You develop effective implementation and procurement strategies, consistent with business needs. You ensure alignment to relevant technical strategies, policies, standards, and practices.
• 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).

Works Closely With:

You’ll be working closely with other Principal Software Engineers, Heads of Software Engineering, Heads of Product, Commercial, Finance, Software Engineering Managers, Software Engineers, and Product Managers to collaboratively address problems. There will be day‑to‑day interactions with Technical Programme Managers, who you’ll work with to constantly evolve your team’s ways of working. Depending on your team(s), you could also interact with other specialists such as Architects, Data Scientists, UX/UI Designers, and analytics authorities.

EEO Statement: 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. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process.