Staff Software Engineer - - Manchester - Salford, Greater Manchester

Job Description

Staff Software Engineer - Manchester - Salford, Greater Manchester

Everyone is welcome at M&S. No exceptions. It’s your background, abilities and that make you, uniquely you.

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 that truly understand software engineers and engineering, it’s an exciting time as we’re redefining ourselves into a digital first and engineering-led organisation, with the quality of our engineering team being a key differentiator. The team is responsible for the M&S Platform, managing authentication journeys for both customers and colleagues.

About the Role

The M&S team is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our dynamic team.

You will provide technical expertise, ship thoughtful solutions, and operate with excellence. Creative, curious, and fearless, you will be an integral part of our empowered, self-managing domain engineering team, pushing the boundaries of our Platform. In this role, you will play a key part in driving our ambition to create a best-in-class software engineering team, environment, and culture.

What you’ll do

1. Influence the technical direction of the Platform and shape our long-term architecture.
2. Design solutions that improve the M&S Platform, providing an excellent user authentication experience to our customers and a great developer experience to our engineers.
3. Lead and contribute to cross-team initiatives from design through deployment and operations.
4. Write maintainable, well-tested, high-quality code and uphold engineering best practices.
5. Focus on observability and maintain Service Level Objectives, take operational responsibility for the Platform, including joining the on-call rota.
6. Foster a strong engineering culture through mentorship, code reviews, and collaboration.
7. Lead by example in producing high-quality documentation, including architecture, design, operational, and technical documentation.
8. Work closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers across M&S to design elegant, scalable solutions.
9. Assist with recruiting and onboarding new engineers.

Who you are

1. 8+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, ideally serving millions of users.
2. Deep expertise in one or more JVM-based languages (ideally Kotlin with Micronaut).
3. Proven experience in DevOps practices, including running and operating what you build.
4. Experience designing CI/CD pipelines and driving improvements in developer productivity.
5. Comfortable working in cloud environments (preferably Azure).
6. Experience with standards like OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect is a strong plus.
7. You balance long-term thinking with pragmatic delivery, and thrive in high-autonomy teams.

What’s in it for you

Being a part of M&S is exactly that – becoming a part and playing your part. We’re an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and always evolving business built on core values. Here are some of the benefits we offer:

• 20% Colleague discount on most things from furniture, fashion, and food.
• A first-class welcome to M&S with a tailored induction and a wide range of training schemes to help with your learning and development.
• Attractive annual bonus, based on company performance and personal objectives.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
• Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices website.
• Charity Volunteer Day – A paid day away from work to support your chosen charity.
• A very generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support, including a 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist for you and your family.

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