Job Purpose

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 committed 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 into a digital first and engineering-led organisation, with the quality of our engineering team being a key differentiator.

We are seeking a passionate Principal Software Engineering Manager who will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtfully and operate with excellence. Being creative, curious, and adventurous, 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 sophisticated and robust solutions to solve advanced problems for our customers and colleagues.

M&S Technology is looking to drive a step change in store operational efficiency and experience through our Intelligent Store strategy. Using data from sensors and applications to provide insight on our store operation and turn this into action - ensuring store colleagues know what to do, how to do it at the right time with the right tools and data. The breadth of the solution covers native and web applications, an evolving service landscape, event and stream driven business logic and IoT and sensor technology ranging from RFID to Machine Vision.

You will play a key role in driving our ambition to build an outstanding 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.

Key Accountabilities and Responsibilities

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

Lead senior engineers to build and maintain high quality and reliable software

Responsible for the engineering excellence of their teams e.g., behaviours, operations, and technical quality

Line manage and develop senior engineers to ensure they have the right skills, development plans and demeanour to learning

Maintain and cultivate effective relationships with Product and Delivery teams in order to prioritise, problem solve & maximise value to market

Work with the wider Technology function to implement the technical strategy, adopting the North Star principles

Lead the development and improvements to M&S standard frameworks and policies, ensuring that they are understood and adopted

Coach, support and guide senior engineers to produce clean, quality code through code reviews and pair programming

Drive DevOps practices to automate the Product development life cycle and ownership demeanour

Foster a culture of experimentation and innovation to drive solutions

Ensure products are fully supported by teams and product groups both in and out of hours

Lead development of Product Group OKRs and Product health, and demonstrate responsibility for the entire Product Group's objectives

Drive the improvement and measurement of Product Group quality and reliability via software engineering standard methodologies and metrics

Orchestrate continuous learning and improvement initiatives for the Product(s) and Product Group(s)

Solve problems collaboratively, communicating decisions to senior partners

Lead product planning and roadmap with an agile mind-set focusing on supporting our colleagues

Engage with product colleagues to improve value for the customer and to understand ambiguous requirements

Demonstrate and champion pragmatism in terms of commercial delivery and software quality

Promote technology, innovation, values, and ways of working within the team and wider community

Active contribution and leading of Fellowships and Orchestras (Communities of Practice) with a focus on positive momentum

Lead recruitment and new starter on-boarding activities

Own and deliver initiatives to take M&S Software Engineering to the next level by challenging the status quo

Enhance and implement M&S Engineering talent strategy

Foster self-management and accountability at the team level through servant leadership

Support recruitment and brand outreach activities.

Key Experience

Job knowledge – specialist skills, experiences, qualifications, specific systems or practices relevant to the role, the latest function specific knowledge

Business knowledge – level of commercial awareness, economic, commercial, political experience, industry specific knowledge to differentiate M&S from competitors

Problem solving – analytical skills, ability to direct, lead and deliver solutions that go beyond existing ways of doing things

People & Leadership skills – communications, leadership and talent development skills.

Essential

Excellent knowledge in all stack areas, from front-end through to back-end

Extensive background in software engineering with several years’ experience in a variety of systems and technologies

Consistent track record in delivering, operating, leading, hiring and pivoting at Product Group level and above

Strong experience of leading successful delivery in a scaled agile software environment

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,

Great knowledge and advocate for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Enthusiast of DevOps: you build it, you run it

Strong understanding of testing strategies and reliability engineering

Highly organised and can lead workstreams, handle senior partners and their expectations

Excellent people management, interpersonal, analytical, and problem-solving skills

Ability to lead and line manage senior engineers, engineering managers 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 attitude that is willing to take ownership

Able to influence people at senior levels and from the highly technical to non-technical

Desirable

Previous polyglot hands-on senior software engineer

Leading large product areas with 10+ teams

Previous software engineering community leadership experience

Professional presentation delivery at internal and external events

An ambition to be an open-source contributor, technology writer or speaker

Knowledge of Software approaches like Domain Driven Design

Experience in event driven API architectures and associated best practises

Advocate and experience of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Sophisticated experience of DevOps: you build it, you run it

Advanced experience with cloud engineering

Cares about the business and the bigger picture with significant prior examples

A senior leadership attitude that is willing to take ownership

Demonstrable entrepreneurship in previous organisation(s)

Experience with distributed systems, preferably Internet of Things or sensor-based solutions.

Experience with event-based architectures.

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 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 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 smart/flexible working.  We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process. If you consider yourself to have a disability or learning difficulty which means you are unable to complete the application process online, please get in touch either by phone on 0345 300 3725 or by email recruitment.online@marksandspencer.com so we can make alternative arrangements for you.

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