Software Engineering Manager - Food & International Food

All the details

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 that run right through the company's core and technology leaders who truly understand software engineering, it's an exciting time as we continue our transformation into a digital-first, engineering-led organisation, with the quality of our engineering teams being a key differentiator.

We are modernising the platforms that power how M&S Foods designs products, collaborates with suppliers and manages commercial decisions. These systems sit at the centre of the M&S Foods ecosystem and support thousands of internal users and suppliers across product development, supply chain and commercial operations.

As a Software Engineering Manager - Food & International Food , you will help shape the architecture and technical direction of these platforms. Working across multiple product teams, you'll solve complex engineering problems, improve system reliability and establish shared technical patterns that enable teams to build safely and efficiently. Our focus is evolving a complex landscape of legacy systems and point-to-point integrations into modern API-led and event-driven distributed systems that are easier to scale, operate and extend.

What You'll Do

Your key accountabilities will include:

• Lead and develop high-performing engineering teams, creating a culture of collaboration, accountability, innovation and continuous improvement.
• Define and evolve architecture for critical systems across the Foods domain, including service boundaries, integration patterns, APIs, event models and data structures.
• Lead the design of solutions that span multiple teams and distributed systems, solving complex engineering challenges at scale.
• Modernise legacy platforms and integrations, helping transition existing workflows from tightly coupled and batch-based approaches to scalable API-led and event-driven architectures.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture discussions, design reviews, mentoring and collaborative problem-solving across multiple engineering teams.
• Champion engineering excellence by raising standards in testing, observability, reliability, resilience and operational practices.
• Enable teams to adopt shared platform capabilities and reusable patterns, reducing duplication and driving consistency across the technology landscape.

Key challenges you'll help solve:

• Simplifying complex legacy integrations across enterprise systems.
• Defining clear domain boundaries and service ownership across platforms.
• Moving from batch and point-to-point integrations to API-led and event-driven architectures.
• Designing reliable APIs and event contracts used across multiple teams.
• Improving platform observability, resilience and operational visibility.
• Enabling teams to build on shared platform capabilities instead of duplicating solutions.

Who You Are

Your skills and experience will include:

• Proven experience leading and developing high-performing software engineering teams while delivering scalable, reliable software solutions.
• Strong software engineering background with experience designing distributed systems, APIs and enterprise integration solutions.
• Experience leading technical design across multiple services, platforms or engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, domain modelling, cloud technologies, DevOps principles and modern software engineering practices.
• Experience simplifying and modernising complex legacy systems and integration landscapes.
• Strong understanding of event-driven architecture, messaging systems and distributed application design.
• Experience improving observability, testing, reliability and operational excellence across production systems.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management and leadership skills, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A collaborative leadership style with strong analytical and problem-solving skills, alongside a passion for coaching and mentoring engineers.

Desirable Experience

• Experience within retail, supply chain, product lifecycle management, supplier platforms or commercial business systems.
• Experience working with product data, master data, supplier integrations or new product development platforms.
• Experience leading engineering transformation and modernisation initiatives within complex enterprise environments.

Tech Stack

M&S uses a variety of technologies including:

• Backend: Java, Spring, Spring Boot, Micronaut
• Frontend: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Angular
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Azure Cloud, Kubernetes
• Observability: Dynatrace
• Event Streaming: Kafka
• Supply Chain Platforms: Blue Yonder, PIM systems
• Caching & Performance: Ignite, Redis

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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