Software Engineering Manager

Software Engineering Manager - Integration Edge & Gateway Why Digital & Tech at M&S?

We're changing the way we do things, and putting industry leading innovation at the heart of how we operate; we need a stellar engineering team to make it happen. You'll be joining one of the most iconic brands in the UK on its most exciting cycle yet. We're more integrated and product led in our tech teams than ever before: learning, changing, and adapting constantly, with millions of people benefiting from your work every single day.

This is a leadership role at the heart of M&S's integration transformation. You'll be building and leading an engineering team responsible for the messaging backbone and integration platforms that connect every major system at M&S from warehouse management and food distribution to SAP financials and partner connectivity.

This is a transformative role. We're at the beginning of a multi-year journey to modernise our integration estate and build a cloud-native platform for the future. You won't just be keeping the lights on, you'll be leading the engineering team that builds what comes next, while maintaining the mission-critical flows that process millions of messages daily.

Our current integration estate spans IBM technologies (MQ, App Connect Enterprise, Data Stage, DB2), Mule Soft, Apigee, Mongo

DB Atlas, and Azure cloud services. Observability is provided through Dynatrace.

• Define the future state: Shape the target integration platform architecture and the roadmap to get there, working alongside Principal Engineers and Architects
• Build platform capabilities: Create self-service patterns and golden paths so product teams can integrate without central team bottlenecks
• Maintain operational excellence: Keep the messaging backbone reliable and predictable, where incidents are rare and quickly resolved
• Improve reliability: Drive measurable reductions in incident rates, mean time to resolution, and on-call burden
• Develop your team: Build a high-performing engineering team, driving recruitment, retention, and professional growth

• Lead multiple integration engineering teams, owning the technical vision and delivery roadmap
• Be accountable for reliability targets and operational health across messaging and integration platforms
• Drive operational excellence: on-call health, incident response, change management, and peak readiness
• Cultivate single-threaded ownership, your team builds it, they run it
• Partner with other engineering managers across the integration domain to ensure coherent patterns and shared standards
• Act as the key technical partner for any vendor delivery, owning outcomes not just outputs
• Line manage Staff and Senior Engineers, driving recruitment, retention, and professional growth
• Balance capacity across operational stability, platform modernisation, and technical debt reduction

• Previous hands-on experience with enterprise messaging technologies (IBM MQ, Azure Service Bus, or similar)
• Depth in integration middleware: ACE, Mule Soft, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, or equivalent
• Track record of leading engineering teams through platform modernisation or legacy-to-cloud migrations
• Strong understanding of reliability engineering: SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident management
• Ability to balance operational stability with transformation: you know when to protect production and when to push for change
• Excellent people management and communication skills: you can adjust for technical and non-technical audiences
• A servant-leadership mentality: you unblock your team, set direction, and take ownership of outcomes
• Comfortable operating at both strategic and tactical levels. You can discuss architecture with architects and debug a production incident with your engineers

• Experience with IBM technologies (MQ, ACE, Data Stage, DB2) and cloud-native alternatives
• Azure integration services (Service Bus, Functions, Logic Apps, Event Hub)
• Background in retail, logistics, or other high-volume transaction environments
• Experience with DR/HA patterns, peak planning, and peak-period operations
• Experience building and leading blended teams across permanent, contract, and vendor resources

• Our current integration estate spans IBM technologies (MQ, App Connect Enterprise, Data Stage, DB2), Mule Soft, Apigee, Mongo
  
  DB Atlas, and Azure cloud services. Observability is provided through Dynatrace. CI/CD is delivered through Git Hub Actions and Terraform.

• 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…