Principal Software Engineer - Service Experience

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.

• Here are some of the benefits we offer that make working for M&S just that little bit more special…

• 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.

The Product

We have a genuine ambition to become engineering first, building and operating an elite digital platform. We are looking for people to join our community of engineers to support this transformation, build a modern digital ecosystem.

What you’ll do

Scope:

We are seeking a passionate Principal Software Engineer to join us working across Fulfilment systems at M&S, where you will be a driving force behind the modernisation of critically important systems for M&S, as we scale. As a technical leader, you will be collaborating with multiple multi-functional teams to design, build, and maintain the software that powers our fulfilment operations: order and returns management, fulfilment optimisation, stock management, in-store fulfilment and collections, supplier and carrier management. Your expertise will help us create a best-in-class engineering environment while ensuring our systems are robust and scalable.


What you’ll do

The Principal Software Engineer role is the embodiment of ‘solving problems through technology’ with key responsibilities as follows:

• Lead technical excellence from design to operations and launch of core product features or strategic programmes
• Drive technical direction and influence our overall strategy informing decisions on both Technology and Product investments as well as teams’ setup
• Champion Communities of Practice to help establish engineering excellence at M&S
• Lead by example via contributions to our engineering ecosystem
• Pioneer and promote methodologies like clean code and clean architecture
• Advocate for engineering productivity, delivery quality and operational excellence through a continuous ecosystem
• Drive DevOps practices to automate the Product development life cycle and ownership demeanor
• Partner with both Engineering, Technology and Product leadership to ensure strategies align
• Develop the best and mentor other senior engineering roles across the entire landscape
• Promote effective innovation across all of engineering
• Advocate and strategize for continuous industrialisation and product-minded tech capabilities
• Inspire ideas to foster purpose and mastery to engineering teams, leading them towards autonomy and maturity
• Amplify engineering teams by efficiently unblocking them with direction, leading upward, and establishing alignment
• Raise the profile of MS Tech through public content and contribution/creation into open-source technology
• Support recruitment, onboarding and internal and external brand outreach activities
• Key Accountabilities & Responsibilities
  

Who you are:

• Significant track record of strategic and innovative thinking, as well as execution and implementation
• Specialist in clean code and implementation of design patterns for common problems.
• Depth of knowledge in Information Security, you can design, quality review and quality assure solutions and services with security controls embedded.
• Confident driving system design conversations, building systems characterised by high levels of risk, impact, and business or technical complexity
• Able to analyse current processes, identify, and implement opportunities to optimise processes, and lead and develop a team of specialists to deliver service improvements
• Experience of using a variety of methods of prototyping. You know how to share methodologies and can mentor others. You look at strategic service design end to end
• Strong ability to influence industry-based models for the development of new technology applications. You develop effective implementation and procurement strategies, consistent with business needs. You ensure alignment to relevant technical strategies, policies, standards, and practices
• Strong understanding of quality assurance, testing quadrants and the testing pyramid, and how to apply them
• Ability to lead senior engineers and technical customers to a desired outcome, without prescribing it
• Authoritative skills at cloud computing (network, security, serverless, Kubernetes etc) and automation
• Experience with implementation of Observability and Reliability using market technologies (e.g.: Dynatrace)
• Good experience with Performance Engineering (load testing, derivations, tuning, core web vitals, page speed etc.)
• Expertise in reliability testing
• Able to influence people at senior levels and from the highly technical to non-technical
  
  
  Working for Us Means
• Hybrid Working
• Industry leading pension of up to 12% M&S contribution
• Bonus up to 40%
• 20% discount on M&S products
• Up to 2 weeks working abroad
• Learning days once a month, Tech/Ed days once a quarter and Hackathon every other quarter
• A range of wellbeing support (including free counselling and a virtual GP for you and immediate family)
• 25% off gym memberships, access to online fitness classes and discounts for complementary health services, such as nutrition and lifestyle coaching
  

Tech Stack

• M&S uses a variety of technologies across Fulfilment systems, including:
• Java, Micronaut, GraphQL
• ReactJS, Next.js
• Kafka, MongoDB
• Azure Cloud, Terraform, Dynatrace (observability)

M&S is ready to push boundaries to lead the industry into a greener, speedier, more inspiring digital era. That’s why we’re revolutionising how we work. 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 are committed to an active Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunities Policy, which starts with our recruitment and selection process. We are happy to talk flexible working and ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process.

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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