Staff Software Engineer - Web Platform

Team
Digital & Tech
Store
London Support Office
Location
London, Greater London
Contract type
Permanent
Position type
Full Time
Salary
Competitive + Benefits
Closing date: 28th February 2025

How We Hire

Everyone is welcome at M&S. No exceptions. It’s your background, abilities and differences that make you, uniquely you. And when you’re part of M&S, that individuality has the potential to make waves.

About the role

This section tells you all you need to know about the position and its responsibilities, outlining everything we hope to see in a successful candidate.

All the details

Staff Software Engineer - Web Platform

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 outstanding 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.

#LI-Hybrid

What you’ll do

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you’ll be joining a well-loved historic brand, working on solutions that serves 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 Staff Software Engineer who will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtfully and operate with excellence. Being creative, curious, and fearless, 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 teams you will deliver elegant and robust solutions to solve complex problems for our customers and colleagues.

The Web Platform is a set of opinionated tools (Next.js, TypeScript, NX, Playwright, Jest, GitHub Actions) used by anyone building web apps at M&S. We focus on productivity metrics, developer satisfaction, and lead time to change, to make sure every engineer at M&S is as effective as they can be. The Staff Software Engineer role is the embodiment of ‘solving problems through technology’ with key responsibilities as follows:

  • Software Development: Write, test, and debug code for complex features, distributed systems, or legacy migrations. Lead on designing and optimising deployment pipelines.
  • Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance and support on complex, high-impact projects that align with team objectives, ensuring successful delivery of software solutions, while tackling the hardest technical challenges for the team.
  • Architecture and Design: Lead the development of architectural and design solutions for large-scale projects, ensuring that software solutions align with business requirements, long-term technology strategy, and technology standards.
  • Code Review: Review and provide constructive feedback on code submissions from team members, ensuring alignment to technical standards, maintainability, and high-quality software.
  • Collaboration: Communicate and collaborate with a diverse range of collaborators, including senior management and external partners, while leading or starting communities of practice.
  • Mentorship: Actively mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering an environment of continuous learning and growth, while participating in hiring processes and training engineers up to Staff standard.
  • Operational Stability: Demonstrate a production first attitude, continuously considering observability and maintaining Service Level Objectives, while delivering change at pace.
  • Research & Innovation: Embrace emerging technologies and trends, and share insights with the organisation, while developing and maintaining the team technology roadmap and leading on the strategic approach to monitoring and maintaining production systems.
  • Documentation: Write advanced system and operations documentation and perform advanced internal tech talks to share knowledge and best practices.
  • Recruitment & Onboarding: Assist with the recruitment and onboarding of new engineers into the organisation

Tech stack

M&S Front-end teams use a variety of technologies including

  • React (Next.js / Typescript),
  • GraphQL Federation
  • Azure Cloud
  • Observability Tools such as New Relic and Dynatrace

Who you are

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’ll have strong experience in most of the tech stack areas, from front-end through to back-end
  • Expert understanding of software development practices
  • Solid expertise with distributed version controls systems like Git
  • Proficiency with Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development and non-functional testing
  • Strong experience of DevOps: you build it, you run it
  • Advocate of Continuous integration and Continuous Delivery
  • Experience with cloud engineering and highly scalable applications
  • Proficiency of documenting software design technical decisions and recommendations
  • Great leadership and coaching skills with the ability to develop engineering colleagues

Desirable experience

  • Knowledge of modern front-end techniques - edge computing, micro-frontends, server components
  • Experience with developer productivity frameworks such as DORA and SPACE

Everyone’s welcome

We are ambitious about the future of retail. We’re redefining, innovating and leading the industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We’re redefining 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.

#LI-CW1

Meet the Team

digital_thumbnail.jpg
A group of colleagues gathered around a table, smiling and discussing work with laptops open in a modern office setting.

Being an in-person business

We're at our best when we're close to customers, and for many of us at M&S, that means working in store every day.

To stay close to customers, our support teams are in the office three days a week as we believe that skills are developed through collaboration, and that spending time together makes us more creative and connected. It also means we can solve problems as soon as they arise, learn and grow as a team, build trust, and get closer to our colleagues.

Click to skip quote slider carousel
Janak Staff iOS Engineer
Halford Head of Technical Program Management
Deepak Data Scientist

I think all engineers just love solving puzzles and problems. At M&S, we’re constantly learning new things, whether it’s mastering Swift UI or understanding how customers interact with technology. But this is also a business that listens to engineers and values what we bring to the table. That’s different, believe me.

Janak (He / Him) | Staff iOS Engineer Read full story

Being in third-party brands, working on things M&S hasn’t done before… that plays to my sweet spot. I’ve worked in many organisations throughout my career, and it’s rare to see such cause and effect in your work. The way we’re structured means you’re encouraged to solve problems and you have the autonomy to make progress quickly.

Halford (He / Him) | Head of Technical Program Management Read full story

At M&S, we have Data Scientists, Analysts, and Technical Product Managers, who all share a genuine passion for harnessing data to improve people’s lives. And we’re in a unique position where we can actually help many different kinds of people, from our customers to our colleagues in store and in our support centre.

Deepak (He / Him) | Data Scientist Read full story

Make Your Mark

Upcoming projects

Take part in our M&S Digital & Tech team days. Grow your digital and data skills through our BEAM Academy. Or challenge yourself at one of our business-wide hackathons. We also partner with Women in Data, Databricks and Cajigo to increase opportunities for women in digital and data.

Opportunities to be heard

Your voice and your ideas matter here. Our 8 colleague networks are places to find support, listen to each other and encourage debate. You can pitch ideas ‘Straight to Stuart’, our CEO, or get involved in our BIG (Business involvement Group).

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Colleague Networks

We want you to feel supported, no matter what.

Forces Community Network

Supporting colleagues connected to the Armed Forces, aiding their transition to civilian life, and ensuring that they thrive in the workplace.

The Cancer Network

This is a network driven by personal experiences, with the purpose of ensuring that anyone in the M&S family affected by Cancer feels supported and has access to the information they need.

The Gender Equality Network

This group is focused on helping to create a workplace where gender-related challenges are addressed. They raise awareness of common barriers faced and offer support. They also challenge the business to act and empower individuals to ensure that everyone has equal access to opportunities.

Culture and Heritage Network

Raising awareness of various religions and cultures through events and comms, to educate others and better represent our M&S colleagues and customers.

Health and Wellbeing Network

Providing a safe space for colleagues with all types of health conditions or disabilities and supporting with business initiatives to ensure our stores are truly accessible for our customers.

The Family & Carers Network

This group represents the different types of families that exist. We act as a support network and sounding board for ideas which help our colleagues as parents or carers. We also run an interactive blog, where you can write your own posts or hear about others' experiences.

The LGBTQ+ Network

Open to all members of the LGBTQ+ community and spectrum (and their allies), we promote equality, celebrate inclusivity and diversity, and encourage everyone to be themselves - whatever their sexual or gender identity.

Menopause Network

Initiating and encouraging open conversations about menopause by offering support and sharing experiences.

Benefits

How to Apply

Here’s what to expect at each stage of the application process. This can change depending on the role you’ve applied to. If you need any reasonable adjustments made at any stage, let us know and we can help.

Send us your application

Fill in our short application form and hit submit.

Online assessment

Depending on the role you are applying for, you may be invited to do an assessment. Your Talent Acquisition Partner will guide and inform you along the way.

Interview

We'll invite you to join us for an interview. This could be remote or in person. Here, we'll ask you some role based technical questions and examine the behaviours we're looking for. 

Decision

After we’ve made our decision, we’ll be in touch. If you’ve been successful, we’ll officially invite you to join the team and let you know the next steps.

Staff Software Engineer - Web Platform

Team
Digital & Tech
Store
London Support Office
Location
London, Greater London
Contract type
Permanent
Position type
Full Time
Salary
Competitive + Benefits
Closing date: 28th February 2025
Reference: 92628