Senior Software Engineer - Loyalty

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.

As a Senior Software Engineer, your expertise will help us on this journey – creating customer‑facing capabilities that are robust, scalable, observable, and grounded in best‑in‑class engineering practice. The M&S Loyalty team is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our dynamic, high‑impact engineering group. You will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtful solutions, and operate with excellence. Creative, curious, and fearless, you will be an integral part of our empowered, self‑managing engineering team, pushing the boundaries of our Sparks loyalty experiences and underpinning systems.

Our team owns the Loyalty Platform – services that underpin the customer journeys and functional capabilities used across the Sparks ecosystem. We enable product teams to ship faster, safer, and with higher quality by providing a world‑class customer and developer experience foundation. In this role, you will help us drive our ambition to build a best‑in‑class software engineering team, culture, and environment. Join our community of engineers to build a modern digital ecosystem, improve the experience for millions of customers, and do the best work of your career.

What You'll Do

• Build, evolve, and maintain Loyalty platform services, ensuring they enable secure, scalable, and high‑performance interactions for customers across Sparks journeys.
• Take end‑to‑end ownership of features – from design and development through testing, deployment, documentation, and production monitoring.
• Contribute to the technical direction of the Loyalty team, shaping solutions that balance user experience, scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence.
• Write clean, maintainable, well‑tested code and champion engineering best practices across the organisation.
• Work closely with engineers across multiple domains to understand needs, reduce friction, and improve customer and developer experience.
• Participate in our support rota and take shared responsibility for the reliability, observability, and operational health of Loyalty services.
• Contribute to code reviews, pair programming, tech discussions, working groups, and documentation to share knowledge and continually raise engineering standards.
• Influence and advocate for foundational engineering improvements, modernisation initiatives, and enhancements across the Sparks ecosystem.
• Mentor engineers at different levels through coaching, pairing, and structured feedback.

Who You Are

• Experienced in building and scaling distributed systems.
• Familiar with JVM‑based languages or backend service frameworks (Micronaut is a plus but not essential).
• Hands‑on experience with DevOps, CI/CD, automated testing, and operating what you build.
• Familiarity with modern event‑driven technologies, particularly Kafka.
• Experienced in cloud environments (preferably Azure) and container platforms such as Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of modern backend development, platform‑adjacent standards, and scalable architectural patterns.
• Pragmatic, collaborative, and comfortable working in a high‑autonomy team with strong engineering culture.
• Passionate about enabling other engineers and improving engineering experience at scale.

Tech Stack

• Java, node.js
• JUnit, Mockito, testcontainers
• Micronaut, GraphQL, gRPC
• Azure Cloud, Kubernetes
• GitHub Actions, Dynatrace
• Snyk, Semgrep, Wiz
• Java, Spring, Micronaut
• SQL Server, MongoDB
• Redis, Ignite

What's In It For You

Working at M&S means being part of something bigger – helping deliver quality, value, and service to millions every day. We're inclusive, fast‑moving, and always evolving, with a strong sense of purpose and a focus on doing the right thing.

• 20% colleague discount on all M&S products and many third‑party brands.
• Competitive holiday allowance with the option to buy more.
• Discretionary performance‑based bonus schemes.
• Strong pension and life assurance.
• Tailored induction and continuous development support.
• Exclusive perks and savings through our M&S Choices portal.
• Market‑leading, family‑friendly policies (parental, adoption, neonatal leave).
• 24/7 wellbeing support including virtual GP and mental health services.
• One paid volunteer day per year.

Everyone's Welcome

We are ambitious about the future of retail – disrupting, innovating, and leading our industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We're transforming how we work together and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. 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 support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please let us know when completing your application so we can ensure you are set up for success.