Software Engineering Manager - Identity

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 Software Engineering Manager who will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtfully and operate with excellence to build the foundational platform for Identity across all M and S products. The team is responsible for the M&S Identity Platform, managing authentication journeys for both customers and colleagues. We sit at a unique intersection, delivering seamless authentication experiences for customers while enabling internal teams to build on a robust Identity Platform.

Being kind, creative, curious, and confident, you will be an integral part of our empowered, multi‑disciplinary engineering teams – building resilient systems. You will be closely working with Principal engineers, product and delivery peers to drive the successful delivery of projects and features.

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.

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Software Development & Architecture: Responsible for design and architectural decisions, developing scalable and distributed systems, and driving legacy migrations. Focused on optimizing deployment pipelines to enhance efficiency and reliability.
• Quality, Stability & Standards: Establish quality standards to meet performance, reliability, and maintainability of the systems. With a strong production‑first mindset, drive observability, maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and ensure efficient incident resolution. Oversee the maintenance of existing systems, ensuring continuous improvements and prompt resolution of issues.
• Agile Delivery & Collaboration: Working closely with product, design, and programme management, you will lead the engineering delivery aligning to the business objectives. Collaboration will be key as you engage with senior leadership, cross‑functional teams, and external partners to drive strategy and execution.
• Technical Leadership: You will provide technical direction on high‑impact projects, tackling engineering challenges within the team. Engage in code reviews, ensuring high standards, maintainability, and alignment with best practices. Foster a culture of continuous improvement, technical excellence, and shared learning across the team.
• Hiring, Team Growth & Management: Manage team structure, budgets, resource allocation across projects. Hiring and onboarding new engineers, ensuring a seamless transition into the team. Coaching and mentoring engineers at all levels, tailoring your approach to help them grow into more senior technical and leadership roles.
• Technology Strategy & Knowledge Sharing: Driving innovation and continuous improvement across the team, managing technology roadmap, ensuring long‑term strategic alignment. Lead on documentation efforts and internal tech talks, sharing knowledge and best practices to strengthen the technical community.

Your skills and experience will include:

• Recognize that great engineering is as much about people as it is about technical expertise and lead with empathy.
• Previous polyglot hands‑on lead software engineer.
• Experience working on highly scalable software solutions across web or backend.
• Extensive background in software engineering with several years’ experience in a variety of systems and technologies.
• Experience building and leading teams of highly skilled, senior software engineers that deliver high‑quality software.
• Excellent understanding of system design, software architecture, cloud, and software engineering standard methodologies.
• Great leadership and coaching skills with the ability to develop engineering colleagues.

Tech stack: Java, Kotlin, GraphQL Federation, Micronaut, Azure Cloud, GitHub, New Relic and Dynatrace.

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.

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.