Software Engineering Manager- Payments

Why Digital & Tech at M&S? 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.

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.
• 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.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support – this includes access to our 24/7 Virtual GP, PAM Assist to support you and your family as well as many other schemes.
• Family friendly policies to support life's most important landmarks including parental leave, neo‑natal.

What you’ll do

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Joining M&S Design and Technology as a Software Engineering Manager within the Store Payments & Infrastructure domain.
• Managing 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.
• 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.
• Leading alignment with the overarching technical strategy and working with the wider Technology organisation to craft it.
• Acting 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.
• Collaborating 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.
• Driving objectives and outcomes associated with our engineering performance framework related to systems' reliability, speed of change and quality.
• Acting as the key technical partner when vendors are involved, owning third‑party delivery.
• Driving the modernisation and planning ahead the evolution of the software delivery lifecycle.

Who you are

Your skills and experience will include:

• Previous polyglot hands‑on senior software engineer, with experience working across complex, production‑critical systems.
• Excellent knowledge in modern web, mobile or backend technologies.
• Extensive background in software engineering with several years of experience across a variety of systems and technologies.
• Experience building and leading teams of highly skilled, senior software engineers.
• Excellent understanding of system design, software architecture, cloud and software engineering standard methodologies.
• Promoter of DevOps: you build it, you run it, with strong ownership of systems in production.
• Strong understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering.
• Experience modernising legacy systems and managing technical debt.
• Strong experience working in Agile environments.
• Good understanding of end‑to‑end solution lifecycles.
• Experience working across distributed teams.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Able to make clear prioritisation and trade‑off decisions.
• Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical and problem‑solving skills.
• Ability to lead and line‑manage senior engineers and technical partners.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken.
• Customer and team centric mentality that is willing to take ownership of problems and outcomes.

Our Tech Stack

Our technology landscape combines modern engineering practices with highly integrated store systems. We work with a range of technologies, including:

• Rest APIs with Micronaut Spring Boot and J Unit
• 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

A key aspect of this domain is the integration with third‑party applications and local store hardware, including tills, self‑checkout and connected peripherals.

Everyone is 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. 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 thoughtfully. 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.