Principal Software Engineer - Selling Experience

Principal Software Engineer – Selling Experience Why Digital & Tech at M&S We're changing the way we do things, and putting industry leading innovation at the heart of how we operate; we need a stellar engineering team to make it happen. You'll be joining one of the most iconic brands in the UK on its most exciting cycle yet. We're more integrated and product led in our tech teams than ever before: learning, changing, and adapting constantly, with millions of people benefiting from your work every single day.

The Product

We have a genuine ambition to become engineering first, building and operating an elite digital platform. We are looking for people to join our community of engineers to support this transformation, build a modern digital ecosystem.

Scope:

You will be championing Engineering excellence in a key area for M&S, that enables our on-line customers to find, evaluate and buy products. As the Principal Engineer for Selling Experience, you will support multiple teams in providing an engaging, simplified, transparent and inspirational digital experience that delivers the best online purchasing experience in the UK and Irish market. This exceptional web channel attains, retains and drives frequency of customers and aligns with the broader omni-channel experience to deliver the M&S unified customer commerce ambition.

You will be responsible for:

• Optimising the M&S on-line Web Experience across all device types, as well as SEO
• Leading teams in delivering best-in-class engineering solutions
• Seeing opportunities to improve the efficiency of the team through technology and ways of working, and working with teams to make these a reality
• Championing an experimentation lead culture, driving experimentation across all teams.
• Leading maturity to Elite Dora for all products in the Browse & Select area
• Leading Engineering Excellence and creating culture of innovation.
• Making use of Platforms in order to maximise the value delivered by teams

Key Accountabilities & Responsibilities

The Principal Software Engineer role is the embodiment of ‘solving problems through technology’ with key responsibilities as follows:

• 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 Engineering, Technology and Product leadership to ensure strategies align
• Develop the best and mentor other engineers 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
  

What We Need From You:

• Experience in implementing solutions using modern, web facing software solutions that provide the best possible experience across multiple devices
• 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
• 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, Dynatrace)
• Good experience with Performance Engineering (load testing, derivations, tuning, core web vitals, page speed etc.)
• Expertise in reliability testing

Working for Us Means

• Hybrid Working
• Industry leading pension of up to 12% M&S contribution
• Bonus up to 40%
• 20% discount on M&S products
• Up to 2 weeks working abroad
• Learning days once a month, Tech/Ed days once a quarter and Hackathon every other quarter
• A range of wellbeing support (including free counselling and a virtual GP for you and immediate family)
• 25% off gym memberships, access to online fitness classes and discounts for complementary health services, such as nutrition and lifestyle coaching

M&S is ready to push boundaries to lead the industry into a greener, speedier, more inspiring digital era. That’s why we’re revolutionising how we work. Marks & Spencer aims to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make an immediate impact. We are committed to an active Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunities Policy, which starts with our recruitment and selection process. We are happy to talk flexible working and ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process.