Staff Software Engineer - Commercial Planning

As part of the M&S Software Engineering team, you’ll be joining a well-loved, historic brand, working on solutions that serve millions of loyal customers and thousands of colleagues. With ethical values running through the company’s core, and technology leaders who truly understand software engineering, it’s an exciting time to join us as we redefine ourselves as a digital-first, engineering-led organisation. The quality of our engineering team is a key differentiator.

This role sits within the Commercial Planning area, supporting M&S’s Fashion, Home & Beauty transformation efforts, which are central to M&S’s ambitious growth and modernisation plans. Your expertise will help us on this journey, creating solutions for the business that are robust, scalable and secure, with strong observability, meaningful metrics and best-in-class engineering practices. Working closely with M&S teams and strategic partners, you’ll play a key role in shaping the next generation of commercial planning platforms and services.

Due to high interest, this role may close earlier than advertised. We recommend applying as soon as possible.

What You'll Do

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Develop, test and debug software solutions, taking a lead on what good coding practices look like and championing engineering excellence across the team.
• Provide expert technical guidance on complex projects, ensuring solutions align with engineering strategy, architectural standards and technology roadmaps.
• Lead the design and delivery of scalable software solutions and third-party integrations, partnering closely with Architecture teams and key stakeholders.
• Conduct thorough code reviews to ensure adherence to technical standards, maintainability, automated testing practices and high-quality software delivery.
• Build strong partnerships with business stakeholders, product managers, engineers and external partners to design effective technical solutions that meet business needs.
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, sharing knowledge and helping develop technical capability across the wider engineering community.
• Drive operational excellence through monitoring, observability, alerting and incident management practices, ensuring learnings from production environments are fed back into development.
• Stay informed of emerging technologies, AI capabilities and engineering trends, proposing innovative solutions that enhance business outcomes and engineering productivity.

Who You Are

Your skills and experience will include:

• Proven track record developing high-performing, robust backend systems and integrations, with a focus on scalability, optimisation and resilience.
• Deep understanding of software engineering principles, design patterns and modern development practices, applied to building maintainable and adaptable systems.
• Strong understanding of automated testing approaches and tooling across unit, integration and end-to-end testing layers.
• Proven hands-on experience implementing DevSecOps practices at scale across enterprise-grade applications and platforms.
• Technical proficiency across a variety of technologies including Java, PL/SQL, JavaScript, Git and CI/CD tooling.
• Experience designing and implementing scalable cloud-based applications with a strong focus on performance, security and operational excellence.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A mentoring mindset with a genuine passion for developing engineers and empowering teams to succeed.
• Proficiency using AI tools such as GitHub Copilot and leveraging agentic workflows to improve software delivery, engineering productivity and development practices.

Desirable Experience

• Knowledge of the retail domain, particularly Fashion, Home & Beauty, Commercial Planning or broader retail technology landscapes, would be advantageous but is not essential.
• Experience working within large-scale transformation programmes involving multiple vendor and partner organisations.
• Familiarity with domain-driven design, event-driven architectures and modern cloud-native application development.

Tech Stack

Teams use a variety of technologies, including:

• Languages & Frameworks: PL/SQL, Java/Spring Boot, Kotlin/Micronaut (desirable), Python (desirable).
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Azure IaaS and PaaS services, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and Terraform.
• Data & Messaging: Kafka/Confluent.
• Databases: MongoDB and Azure SQL Server.
• Observability: Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry and PagerDuty.

What’s in it for you?

Working at M&S means being part of something bigger - helping to deliver quality, value and service to millions of customers every day. We’re inclusive, fast-moving and always evolving, with a strong sense of purpose and a focus on doing the right thing.

Here are just a few of the benefits that make working here even more rewarding:

• 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 support a cause that matters to you.

Everyone’s Welcome

We 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.

We 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.

If 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. This information will be picked up by our team, so we can try and put steps in place to help you be at your best through this process.

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