Principal Software Engineer - Personalisation

As a Principal Engineer at M&S, you’ll play a critical role in shaping our technical direction and delivering against our strategic goals. Acting as a senior technical leader, you’ll drive engineering excellence, influence architecture, and align technology decisions with business priorities.

You’ll join our Personalisation product group, responsible for delivering on-site and in-app personalisation, search, and recommendation capabilities. This includes some of our most innovative customer experiences, such as 1:1 personalised search and AI-powered styling. Working within highly cross‑functional teams spanning engineering, data science, product, and design, you’ll help deliver our vision of making every M&S digital experience feel tailored to the individual customer.

What’s In It For You

Being a part of M&S is exactly that – playing your part to bring the magic of M&S to our customers every day. We’re an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and ever evolving business built on doing the right thing and bringing exceptional quality, value, service to every customer, whenever, wherever and however they want to shop with us.

• After completing your probationary period, you’ll receive 20% colleague discount across all M&S products and many of our third‑party brands for you and a member of your household.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
• Discretionary bonus schemes awarded based on how you achieve your personal objectives and our performance as a business.
• A generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• A dedicated welcome to our teams with a tailored induction and a wide range of training programmes to develop your skills.
• Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices portal to maximise your financial and personal wellbeing.
• Industry‑leading parental, adoption and neonatal policies, providing support and flexibility for your family.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support for all colleagues including access to our 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist to support you and your family.
• A charity volunteer day to support a charity or cause you're passionate about through a dedicated day away from work.

What you’ll be doing

• Define and drive technical strategy, architecture, and engineering standards across the Personalisation domain.
• Design and deliver scalable systems supporting personalisation, search, recommendations, and ML‑powered features.
• Partner closely with Product, Data Science, and Design to deliver customer‑centric solutions.
• Lead and influence technical decision‑making across multiple teams and platforms.
• Mentor and support senior engineers, helping to raise the overall engineering capability.
• Improve engineering quality, reliability, and productivity through best practices, tooling, and platform enhancements.

Who you are

• An experienced technical leader with a strong background in Java/Python and large‑scale production systems.
• Strong experience working with Machine Learning systems and collaborating with Data Science teams.
• Skilled in system design and architecture, with the ability to deliver scalable, high‑quality solutions.
• Comfortable working across cross‑functional environments with multiple stakeholders.
• Passionate about growing others and driving engineering excellence.
• A strong communicator who can influence technical and business decisions at all levels.

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.