Software Engineering Manager - Partnerships (London)

Job purpose

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 passionate Software Engineering Manager who will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtfully and operate with excellence. Being creative, curious, and confident, you will be an integral part of our empowered, self-managing, multi-disciplinary engineering teams – designing, building, releasing, and maintaining products. Working as an equal partner with the Product and Delivery you will deliver sophisticated and robust solutions to solve daring problems for our customers. You will play a key role in driving our ambition to create a best-in-class software engineering team, environment, and culture. We are looking for people to join our community of engineers to drive this transformation, build a modern digital ecosystem using exciting technologies and do the best work of their careers.

You will be responsible for:

1. The M&S Loyalty Partnerships team engineering; building integrations with strategic partners to provide our customers with access to the unique benefits of shopping with those partners.
2. Operational stability of software solutions owned by your team.
3. Delivering high quality solutions that deliver value to the business.
4. Leading on improving the maturity of the team, progress towards or maintaining Elite DORA Standards.
5. Leading Engineering Excellence and creating a culture of innovation.
6. Making use of Platforms in order to maximise the value delivered by teams.

What you'll do

The Software Engineering Manager role is the embodiment of 'solving problems through technology' with key responsibilities as follows:

1. Team Management: 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.
2. Agile Delivery: Oversee the planning, execution, and delivery of software projects, ensuring alignment with business objectives and timelines. Monitor project progress, risks, and dependencies, taking corrective action when necessary. Work closely with product management, design, programme management, and others to define project scope, goals, and deliverables.
3. Technical Leadership: Drive the adoption of standards, and methodologies for software development. Provide technical guidance and support to engineering teams for complex projects. Evaluate and recommend new technologies, tools, and platforms to improve the engineering process and software quality. Work with senior engineers to develop the team's technical roadmap and work closely with the product management team to prioritise it against the commercial roadmap.
4. Quality Assurance and Maintenance: Establish and enforce quality standards, ensuring software products meet performance, reliability, and usability requirements. Oversee the maintenance and support of existing software systems, ensuring prompt resolution of issues and bugs.

Tech stack

The team uses the following core technologies:

• Java / Kotlin
• GraphQL Federation
• Cloud: Azure
• Observability: Dynatrace

Who you are

1. Previous polyglot hands-on senior software engineer.
2. Experience working on highly scalable software solutions across web or backend.
3. Extensive background in software engineering with several years' experience in a variety of systems and technologies.
4. Experience building and leading teams of highly skilled, senior software engineers that deliver high-quality software.
5. Excellent understanding of system design, software architecture, cloud, and software engineering standard methodologies.
6. Promoter of DevOps: you build it, you run it.
7. Strong understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering.
8. Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
9. Ability to lead and line manage senior engineers and technical partners to a desired outcome, without prescribing it.
10. Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different audiences, including non-technical.
11. A servant-leadership mentality that is willing to take ownership of problems.
12. Able to influence people at senior levels and from the highly technical to non-technical.

Desirable experience

1. Knowledge of Software approaches like Domain Driven Design.
2. Previous software engineering community leadership experience.
3. Presentation delivery at internal and external events.
4. An ambition to be an open-source contributor, technology writer or speaker.
5. Advanced experience with cloud engineering.
6. Demonstrable entrepreneurship in previous organisation(s).

What's in it for you

Being a part of M&S is exactly that – becoming a part and playing your part. We're an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and always evolving business built on core values. Here are some of the benefits we offer that make working for M&S just that little bit more special:

• 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. Having options to progress is something we're proud of at M&S.
• 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. Including GymSave – that offers up to 25% off Gym Memberships and the option to become an M&S Shareholder using our ShareSave & ShareBuy Schemes.
• 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.

Everyone's welcome

M&S is ready to push boundaries to lead the retail industry into a greener, speedier, more inspiring digital era. That's why we're revolutionising how we work and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. There's never been a better time to be part of our team. Marks & Spencer aims to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make an immediate impact. We're 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 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.

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.

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