Software Engineering Manager - Online; Returns And Service Comms

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 Software Engineering Manager 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. You will play a key role in driving our ambition to create a best-in-class software engineering team, environment, and culture.

You will join the Online software engineering team and lead the modernisation of critical software underpinning the post-purchase customer experience: the order history, returns and customer self‑service web experience, and the customer communications for order and return tracking.

• Team Management:
  Build, mentor, and manage a high‑performing software engineering team. Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement within the team. Facilitate communication and collaboration among team members. Ensure budgets, people and resource allocation, and workload balance across projects.
• Agile Delivery:
  Oversee the planning, execution, and delivery of software projects, ensuring alignment with business objectives and timelines. Monitor project progress, risks, and dependencies, taking corrective action when necessary. Work closely with product management, design, programme management, and others to define project scope, goals, and deliverables.
• Technical Leadership:
  Drive the adoption of standards, and methodologies for software development. Provide technical guidance and support to engineering teams for complex projects. Evaluate and recommend new technologies, tools, and platforms to improve the engineering process and software quality. Work with senior engineers to develop the team's technical roadmap and support the product management team to prioritise it against the commercial roadmap.
• Quality Assurance and Maintenance:
  Establish and enforce quality standards, ensuring software products meet performance, reliability, and usability requirements. Oversee the maintenance and support of existing software systems, ensuring prompt resolution of issues and bugs.

• Previous polyglot hands‑on senior software engineer
• Experience working on highly scalable back‑end software solutions, ideally Java‑based
• Experience working with Salesforce products such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a plus
• Extensive background in software engineering with several years' experience in a variety of systems and technologies
• 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,
• Promoter of Dev Ops: you build it, you run it.

• React, Next.js, Typescript, Optmizely
• Java, Spring, Spring Boot, Micronaut, Graph
  
  QL, Kafka
• Mongo
  
  DB, Postgres, Redis
• Azure, Kubernetes
• Dynatrace
• Git Hub Actions

• 20% colleague discount on all M&S products and many third‑party brands for you and someone in your household, available once you've completed your probation
• Competitive holiday allowance with the option to buy more
• Discretionary bonus schemes linked to your performance and ours
• Strong pension and life assurance to help plan for the future
• Tailored induction and training to support your development from day one
• Exclusive perks and savings through our M&S Choices portal
• Market‑leading family policies, including parental, adoption and neonatal leave
• 24/7 wellbeing support, including virtual GP access and mental health services
• One paid volunteer day a year to…