Trading Operations Manager

We’re looking for a Food Trading Operations Manager to act as the trusted retail voice for our Food Group, ensuring that every decision we make is grounded in what matters most to customers and colleagues. This role turns strategy into action, simplifying complexity, shaping brilliant commercial ideas, and ensuring they land seamlessly in our stores. You’ll champion store insight at the heart of Food, challenge plans to ensure they’re bold and achievable, and create joined‑up ways of working that drive exceptional customer experiences. If you’re commercially sharp, operationally strong and passionate about elevating food retail, this is a chance to shape how M&S Food comes to life in hundreds of stores nationwide.

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Being the trusted retail voice for your cluster, ensuring initiatives are practical, simple and customer‑focused.
• Leading cluster trials, generating sharp insight and clear recommendations that shape wider Food Group plans.
• Driving rollout of M&S Way, embedding simple and effective processes that support brilliant store execution.
• Turning customer, store and commercial insight into clear, actionable improvements that enhance performance.
• Building strong relationships across Food Trading, Operations, Supply Chain and store leadership to enable fast, aligned decision making.

Your skills and experience will include:

• Strong ability to simplify complexity and produce clear, high‑quality communications for stores and stakeholders.
• Excellent influencing, collaboration and problem‑solving skills, with resilience in fast‑changing environments.
• Proven experience operating across multiple sites/regions with strong planning, prioritisation and execution skills.
• Commercially minded, data‑informed and confident using insight, AI and benchmarking to spot opportunities early.
• A confident communicator who can translate store reality into compelling insight that influences senior stakeholders and shapes decision‑making.

Working at M&S means being part of something bigger - helping to deliver quality, value and service to millions of customers every day. We’re inclusive, fast-moving and always evolving, with a strong sense of purpose and a focus on doing the right thing. Here are just a few of the benefits that make working here even more rewarding:

• 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.

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 put steps in place to help you be at your best through this process.