{"id":185107,"url":"https://alion.io/job/marks-spencer-principal-software-engineer-personalisation","title":"Principal Software Engineer - Personalisation","company":{"id":45913,"name":"Marks & Spencer","domain":"marksandspencer.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/marks-and-spencer","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Oracle","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":100,"open_postings":17,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0.294,"time_to_fill_p50_days":9,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":99000,"max_usd":195000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":46},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-01T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-13","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T03:00:53Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":47,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":2,"flags":["repost"],"days_open":47},"description":"As a Principal Engineer at M&S, you’ll play a critical role in shaping our technical direction and delivering against our strategic goals. Acting as a senior technical leader, you’ll drive engineering excellence, influence architecture, and align technology decisions with business priorities.\nYou’ll join our Personalisation product group, responsible for delivering on-site and in-app personalisation, search, and recommendation capabilities. This includes some of our most innovative customer experiences, such as 1:1 personalised search and AI-powered styling.\nWorking within highly cross-functional teams spanning engineering, data science, product, and design, you’ll help deliver our vision of making every M&S digital experience feel tailored to the individual customer.\nWhat’s In It For You\nBeing a part of M&S is exactly that - playing your part to bring the magic of M&S to our customers every day. We’re an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and ever evolving business built on doing the right thing and bringing exceptional quality, value, service to every customer, whenever, wherever and however they want to shop with us.\nHere are some of the benefits we offer that make working for M&S just that little bit more special…\nAfter completing your probationary period, you’ll receive 20% colleague discount across all M&S products and many of our third-party brands for you and a member of your household.\nCompetitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!\n\nDiscretionary bonus schemes awarded based on how you achieve your personal objectives and our performance as a business.\n\nA generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.\n\nA dedicated welcome to our teams with a tailored induction and a wide range of training programmes to develop your skills.\n\nAmazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices portal to maximise your financial and personal wellbeing.\n\nIndustry-leading parental, adoption and neonatal policies, providing support and flexibility for your family.\n\nAccess to a fantastic range of wellbeing support for all colleagues including access to our 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist to support you and your family.\n\nA charity volunteer day to support a charity or cause you're passionate about through a dedicated day away from work.\n\nWhat you’ll be doing\nDefine and drive technical strategy, architecture, and engineering standards across the Personalisation domain\nDesign and deliver scalable systems supporting personalisation, search, recommendations, and ML-powered features\nPartner closely with Product, Data Science, and Design to deliver customer-centric solutions\nLead and influence technical decision-making across multiple teams and platforms\nMentor and support senior engineers, helping to raise the overall engineering capability\nImprove engineering quality, reliability, and productivity through best practices, tooling, and platform enhancements\nWho you are\nAn experienced technical leader with a strong background in Java/Python and large-scale production systems\nStrong experience working with Machine Learning systems and collaborating with Data Science teams\nSkilled in system design and architecture, with the ability to deliver scalable, high-quality solutions\nComfortable working across cross-functional environments with multiple stakeholders\nPassionate about growing others and driving engineering excellence\nA strong communicator who can influence technical and business decisions at all levels\nEveryone’s Welcome\nWe are ambitious about the future of retail. We’re disrupting, innovating and leading the industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We’re transforming how we work together and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. Marks & Spencer strives to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make change happen.\nWe are committed to building diverse and representative teams, where everyone can bring their whole selves to work and be at their best. We support each other and work together to win together.\nIf you feel you'd benefit from any support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please don’t hesitate to let us know when completing your application. 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