Head of Software Engineering - Personalisation

We are seeking a visionary Head of Software Engineering to lead our Personalisation team. Reporting to the Senior Head of Software Engineering, you will play a pivotal role in shaping our technology strategy, influencing enterprise-wide engineering practices, and ensuring our capabilities meet the highest standards of security, compliance, and performance.

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 Head of Software Engineering 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, Data Science and Delivery teams you will deliver sophisticated and robust solutions to solve daring problems for our customers and colleagues.

You’ll be joining the leadership for the Personalisation product group, who are responsible for our on-site and in-app personalisation, search and recommendations capabilities. The teams in this area work on some of the most innovative features in M&S, e.g. 1:1 Personalised Search and AI Stylist. Teams within this product group are highly cross‑functional, blending engineering, data science, product, design and delivery.

You’ll help deliver the vision of 1:1 personalisation across our estate and help make M&S feel like it was merchandised specifically for each customer individually.

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.

2-8 Engineering Managers (Engineering Managers are responsible for 5-9 Engineers each).

4-8 Squads in a strategic Product Group (50-75 Engineers)

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

• Lead, develop and inspire Engineering Managers and teams, fostering a strong learning culture, high‑quality engineering standards, and clear development and talent strategies.
• Partner closely with Product, Delivery and Technology leadership to shape strategy, prioritise roadmaps, solve complex problems, and maximise value to colleagues and customers.
• Drive technical excellence and modern engineering practices, including Dev Ops, clean code, automation, architecture design, and the adoption of standard frameworks, policies, and North Star principles.
• Own Product Group outcomes and health, setting OKRs, ensuring reliability, quality, SLI/SLO performance, and full operational support across products.
• Champion innovation, continuous improvement and agile ways of working, encouraging experimentation, pragmatism, and commercially sound delivery.
• Build and scale high‑performing teams and communities, leading recruitment, onboarding, coaching, Communities of Practice, and contributing to wider engineering brand and culture.

• M&S uses a variety of technologies including
• React, Next.js, Typescript
• Java
• Kotlin
• Python
• Swift
• Graph
  
  QL Federation
• Cloud:
  Azure
• While M&S is principally a Java environment, the Personalisation group has a mix of Python and Java teams.

• Significant hands‑on experience as a polyglot senior software engineer, with strong expertise across front‑end, back‑end, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and modern development frameworks.
• Leading large product areas with 5+ teams
• Knowledge of Personalisation, Recommendation and…