Software Engineering Manager - Commercial Trading (o9) in London

Join M&S Software Engineering and help shape the digital future of one of the UK's most trusted brands. You'll work on products and platforms that support millions of customers and thousands of colleagues, as part of an organisation investing heavily in becoming digital-first and engineering-led.

We're looking for a Software Engineering Manager who combines strong technical judgement with a passion for building high‑performing teams. This role sits within Fashion Home and Beauty, in our Commercial Planning sub domain. The successful candidate will initially work within a large programme, providing Engineering oversight, and partnering with the Vendor and implementation team to deliver optimal technical solutions.

This is an opportunity to help shape a best‑in‑class engineering culture, environment, and team. If you're excited by modern technology, large‑scale impact, and the chance to influence how engineering is done at M&S, this is a place where you can do some of the best work of your career.

You will be responsible for:

• Ensuring the operational stability and resilience of the software solutions owned by your team.
• Delivering high‑quality software solutions that create measurable value for the business.
• Fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, and establishing strong engineering standards.
• Ensuring cross‑functional requirements such as security, performance, and reliability are built into delivery.
• Holding our Vendors and partners to account for all aspects of good software delivery.
• Challenging solution architecture, and helping drive the right approach for any given business requirement.

What you’ll do:

• Team leadership: Build, mentor, and manage a high‑performing software engineering team. Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement within the team. Facilitate communication and collaboration among team members. Ensure budgets, people and resource allocation, and workload balance across projects.
• Delivery excellence: Oversee the planning, execution, and delivery of software initiatives, ensuring alignment with business goals, timelines, and customer outcomes. Manage risks and dependencies proactively, and work closely with Product, Design, and Delivery partners to define scope and priorities.
• Technical leadership: Drive the adoption of strong engineering practices, standards, and methodologies. Provide guidance on complex technical challenges, shape the team's technical roadmap with senior engineers, and help balance technical investment with product and commercial priorities.
• Quality and reliability: Establish high quality standards so software meets performance, reliability, and usability expectations. Support the ongoing maintenance and improvement of existing systems, ensuring issues are resolved quickly and effectively.

Tech stack:

• Java, Spring, SpringBoot, Micronaut
• React, Next.js, Typescript, Angular
• Azure Cloud, Kubernetes, Dynatrace (observability)
• SQL Server, MongoDB
• Ignite, Redis

Who you are:

• Previous polyglot hands‑on senior 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.
• Promoter of DevOps: you build it, you run it.
• Strong understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering.
• Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical, and problem‑solving skills.
• Ability to lead and line manage senior engineers and technical partners to a desired outcome, without prescribing it.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different, including non‑technical audiences.
• A servant‑leadership mentality that is willing to take ownership of problems.
• Able to influence people at senior levels and from the highly technical to non‑technical.

Desirable experience:

• Knowledge of the Retail domain, particularly around the Clothing Product development and planning lifecycle. Not essential, but would be a big advantage.

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.
• 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.
• Charity Volunteer Day – a paid day away from work to support your chosen charity.
• A very generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• Every colleague at M&S has access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support – this includes access to our 24/7 Virtual GP, PAM Assist to support you & your family as well as many other schemes.

We are 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 happy to talk flexible working. 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. If you consider yourself to require reasonable adjustments to any part of our recruitment process, we invite you to share those requirements with us when completing your application. We will make every effort to ensure your needs are met to provide a fair and transparent process of assessment.