Principal Software Engineer - Customer Platforms

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.

We are seeking a passionate Principal Software Engineer to join us working across our Customer Platform team at M&S, where you will be a driving force behind the modernisation of mission-critical systems for M&S, as we scale.

Responsibilities:

• Lead technical excellence from design to operations and launch of core product features or strategic programmes
• Drive technical direction and influence our overall strategy informing decisions on both Technology and Product investments as well as teams' setup
• Champion Communities of Practice to help establish engineering excellence at M&S
• Lead by example via contributions to our engineering ecosystem
• Pioneer and promote methodologies like clean code and clean architecture
• Advocate for engineering productivity, delivery quality and operational excellence through a continuous ecosystem
• Drive DevOps practices to automate the Product development life cycle and ownership demeanour
• Partner with both Engineering, Technology and Product leadership to ensure strategies align
• Develop the best and mentor other senior engineering roles across the entire landscape
• Promote effective innovation across all of engineering
• Advocate and strategize for continuous industrialisation and product-minded tech capabilities
• Inspire ideas to foster purpose and mastery to engineering teams, leading them towards autonomy and maturity
• Amplify engineering teams by efficiently unblocking them with direction, leading upward, and establishing alignment
• Raise the profile of MS Tech through public content and contribution/creation into open-source technology
• Support recruitment, onboarding and internal and external brand outreach activities

Requirements:

• Significant track record of strategic and innovative thinking, as well as execution and implementation
• Specialist in clean code and implementation of design patterns for common problems
• Depth of knowledge in Information Security, you can design, quality review and quality assure solutions and services with security controls embedded
• Confident driving system design conversations, building systems characterised by high levels of risk, impact, and business or technical complexity
• Able to analyse current processes, identify, and implement opportunities to optimise processes, and lead and develop a team of specialists to deliver service improvements
• Experience of using a variety of methods of prototyping
• Strong ability to influence industry-based models for the development of new technology applications
• Strong understanding of quality assurance, testing quadrants and the testing pyramid, and how to apply them
• Ability to lead senior engineers and technical customers to a desired outcome, without prescribing it
• Authoritative skills at cloud computing (network, security, serverless, Kubernetes etc) and automation
• Experience with implementation of Observability and Reliability using market technologies (e.g.: New Relic)
• Good experience with Performance Engineering (load testing, derivations, tuning, core web vitals, page speed etc.)
• Expertise in reliability testing
• Able to influence people at senior levels and from the highly technical to non-technical

Nice to Have:

• Previous software engineering community leadership experience
• Professional presentation delivery at internal and external events
• An ambition to be an open-source contributor, technology writer or speaker
• Advocate and experience of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
• Advanced experience of DevOps: you build it, you run it
• Cares about the business and the bigger picture with significant prior examples
• Excellent communication skills, both written and spoken and able to adjust for different audiences
• A senior leadership mentality that is willing to take ownership
• Demonstrable entrepreneurship in previous organisation(s)

Benefits:

• 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