Staff AI Software Engineer - AI Engineering Platform

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 people benefiting from your work every single day.

The AI Engineering Platform is used by everyone building software at M&S. It's an opinionated framework for deploying and managing AI agents across the entire Engineering organisation to make sure every engineer at M&S is as effective as they can be. The Staff Software Engineer role is the embodiment of ‘solving problems through technology’ with key responsibilities as follows:

• Software Development: Write, test, and debug code for complex features, distributed systems, or legacy migrations. Lead on designing and optimising deployment pipelines.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance and support on complex, high-impact projects that align with team objectives, ensuring successful delivery of software solutions, while tackling the hardest technical challenges for the team.
• Architecture and Design: Lead the development of architectural and design solutions for large-scale projects, ensuring that software solutions align with business requirements, long-term technology strategy, and technology standards.
• Code Review: Review and provide constructive feedback on code submissions from team members, ensuring alignment to technical standards, maintainability, and high-quality software.
• Collaboration: Communicate and collaborate with a diverse range of collaborators, including senior management and external partners, while leading or starting communities of practice.
• Mentorship: Actively mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering an environment of continuous learning and growth, while participating in hiring processes and training engineers up to Staff standard.
• Operational Stability: Demonstrate a production first attitude, continuously considering observability and maintaining Service Level Objectives, while delivering change at pace.
• Research & Innovation: Embrace emerging technologies and trends, and share insights with the organisation, while developing and maintaining the team technology roadmap and leading on the strategic approach to monitoring and maintaining production systems.
• Documentation: Write advanced system and operations documentation and perform advanced internal tech talks to share knowledge and best practices.
• Recruitment & Onboarding: Assist with the recruitment and onboarding of new engineers into the organisation.

Who You Are:

• Strong experience in most tech stack areas, from front-end through to back-end.
• Expert understanding of software development practices.
• Solid expertise with distributed version control systems like Git.
• Proficiency with Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development and non-functional testing.
• Strong experience of DevOps: you build it, you run it.
• Knowledge of modern front‑end techniques - edge computing, micro‑frontends, server components.
• Experience with developer productivity frameworks such as DORA and SPACE.
• Advocate of Continuous integration and Continuous Delivery.
• Experience with cloud engineering and highly scalable applications.
• Proficiency documenting software design technical decisions and recommendations.
• Great leadership and coaching skills with the ability to develop engineering colleagues.

Our Tech Stack:

• GitHub Copilot SDK, GitHub Actions, and GitHub developer tooling.
• Agentic workflows, tool integrations, and developer automation.
• LLM application patterns including RAG, evaluations, prompts, and orchestration.
• Model evaluation, quality measurement, safety testing, and observability.
• Secure AI integrations, identity, access control, and governance.
• Platform architecture, APIs, extensibility, and integration patterns.
• Cloud deployments, CI/CD, reliability, and operational excellence.
• TypeScript, Kotlin, or another modern language for production platform development.

What’s In It For You:

• 20% colleague discount on all M&S products and many third‑party brands for you and someone in your household, available once you’ve completed your probation.
• Competitive holiday allowance with the option to buy more.
• Discretionary bonus schemes linked to your performance and ours.
• Strong pension and life assurance to help plan for the future.
• Tailored induction and training to support your development from day one.
• Exclusive perks and savings through our M&S Choices portal.
• Market‑leading family policies, including parental, adoption and neonatal leave.
• 24/7 wellbeing support, including virtual GP access and mental health services.
• One paid volunteer day a year to support a cause that matters to you.

Everyone’s Welcome: We are ambitious about the future of retail. We’re disrupting, innovating and leading the industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We’re transforming how we work together and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. Marks & Spencer strives to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make change happen. 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 any support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please don’t hesitate to let us know when completing your application. This information will be picked up by our team, so we can try and put steps in place to help you be at your best through this process.