Software Engineer; IBM Sterling

Summary

The M&S Online Fulfilment area is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Promising team. You will provide technical expertise, lead the design and delivery of robust solutions, and operate with excellence. Creative, curious and pragmatic, you will lead the modernisation of our order management software to provide a seamless customer experience and enable M&S's online growth ambitions through a scalable, reliable, secure and cost-effective system.

The M&S Online Fulfilment area is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Promising team. You will provide technical expertise, lead the design and delivery of robust solutions, and operate with excellence. Creative, curious and pragmatic, you will lead the modernisation of our order management software to provide a seamless customer experience and enable M&S's online growth ambitions through a scalable, reliable, secure and cost-effective system.

The Promising team is on a multi‑year journey to build the platforms and services that will provide accurate delivery details to our customers. We sit at a critical junction in the retail ecosystem, and our ambition is to provide accurate, real‑time delivery and collection options so customers can get the products they want, when and where they want them. Our team is steadily evolving towards a future where reliable availability and delivery data from resilient systems create a market‑leading experience for our customers, driving brand loyalty and revenue.

In this role, you will play a key part in driving our ambition to create a best‑in‑class software engineering team, environment and culture. Join our community of engineers to help build a modern digital ecosystem, work with cutting‑edge technologies and do the best work of your career.

• Build and evolve order management and promising capabilities – design and enhance resilient services, APIs and integrations that support accurate delivery promises, inventory visibility and fulfilment decisions across digital and retail channels. Your work will help ensure customers see reliable availability and delivery options throughout the order journey.

• Own features end to end – take responsibility for design, development, testing, deployment and production support of our promising platform. You will balance delivery speed with long‑term sustainability, ensuring the platform remains reliable, maintainable and scalable.

• Shape the technical direction of our Promising Platform – help evolve the services, integrations and decisioning that power how we source, promise and fulfil orders across stores, distribution centres, suppliers and digital channels. You'll design solutions that balance promise accuracy, integration reliability, operational resilience and cost to serve, using modern engineering practices to build a platform that other teams and customer journeys can depend on.

• Champion engineering excellence – write clean, maintainable, well‑tested code and help establish best practices across multiple teams. You will encourage a continuous improvement culture through code reviews, pair programming and high‑quality documentation.

• Drive operational excellence and observability – share responsibility for the reliability of our data integrations. Use observability tools such as Dynatrace to design for monitoring and alerting and participate in our support rota to ensure supply chain and pricing data remains accurate and available.

• Collaborate widely – work closely with Product Managers, cross‑functional engineering teams and other Fulfilment teams to solve real business problems in thoughtful and innovative ways. Cross‑functional decision making and breaking down information silos are essential to shortening time to value.

• Mentor and support colleagues – provide coaching and feedback to more junior engineers. Help grow our community of practice by sharing knowledge and fostering an inclusive environment.

• A strong technical leader – you bring deep backend engineering experience and a track record of shaping reliable, scalable systems in complex enterprise environments. You are comfortable guiding technical…